Armitage III: Pantheon
by Newtype Alpha
Summary: A.U. Fic - A new "Third Variety" android has appeared among the general public, and an unknown assassin is disposing of them one by one. Detective Ross Syllabus is about to learn the hard way that human life is no longer at market value...
1. Prologue

_And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil... (Genesis 3:22)_

* * *

**Prologue**

The Foreign Minister flinched and jerked fully awake at his desk, reflexively rubbing the sleep from his eyes and straightening his hair before he even knew what stimulus had roused him from his five minute accidental nap. He sat and listened for a moment or two, then heard again the buzzing on the intercom to his secretary's office. He tapped the call button and the young woman—who on weekends doubled as his mistress—warned him tactfully, "Mr. Argent, Ambassador Mariot is here to see you, the usual meeting."

Minister Argent stretched from side to side then glanced at the papers on his desk on which his entire schedule was written out for him. 5:30... _The double M,_ he read, "That's right. Mariot from Mars... United States, right?"

"That's right, Sir."

"Send them in." Argent took a few moments to straighten himself up and make sure he was presentable to his visitor from abroad.

The doubled doors creaked open and Ambassador Mariot seemed to slither into the office with the usual heavy-footed walk that seemed characteristic of Martians in general. He was typical as one of his countrymen; a short but solid man with a thick beard and a purposefulness to his mannerisms that immediately commanded authority. Argent had first met this man on the slopes of Olympus Mons, and in that time and place he imagined that he looked as powerful but awkward on Mars as the Martian did on Earth.

Mariot, as usual, remained standing, bolting himself on the floor in front of his desk like an immovable roadblock. "You never returned my inquiries to your embassy, so I came to ask you in person." Mariot said, suppressing the thick Martian-Greek accent.

Argent feigned innocence. "I haven't received anything from Ithica. What's this about?"

Mariot growled. "Don't insult my intelligence, Jason."

Sighing heavily, Argent leaned back in his chair and pretended to guess, "I don't suppose this has anything to do with what's happening in the Promethean Sea?"

"There's a line of Tyhhrean destroyers blockading the seaports of Narraganset. They've been shelling them almost constantly with cruise missiles, rail guns, satellite weapons, even rover bombs. The United Nations in censuring them for it, once again."

Argent shrugged. "My condolences, but what's so important about this that you had to come all this way just to talk to me about?"

Marriott scowled at him. "Tyhhrea and Bassilus are longstanding allies of the Earth Federation. In fifty years neither of them has in any way relaxed their aggression against neighboring countries, and the Federation has done nothing but support them. What we're asking..."

"Pardon me, Ambassador, but I don't recal this government offering its support to the Tyhhreans or the Bassilus..."

"You want the numbers?" Here again Marriott demonstrated his amazingly accurate memory, "January 3, 2179, the Tyhhrean government contracted Turban Enterprises, Alias Defense Services, Wayland-Mackenzie and Bishop Enterprises. Each of them in turn sub-contracted Grammercy Enterprises, United Defense and Toyota Heavy Industries just to name a few. Do any of these industrial leaders ring a bell?"

Argent was silent for a long moment. He shifted his position in his chair, scratched his belly, then carefully put a reply, "Perhaps this is an issue you should take up with the International Business Commission?"

"Mr. Argent, don't con me," Marriott took two small steps forward and put his hands on the top of the Foreign Minister's desk, "Three of those companies represent the Federation's leading defense contractors. Your entire armed force is privatized, so those contractors basically _are_ your military. And you can play the "free trade" card all you like, you and I both know that your government does have a large degree of control over its service providers."

Argent frowned, "So you're asking us to call off our attack dogs, is that it?"

Not to agree with such harsh terms, Mariot said after a pause, "We want to know just whose side you're on. Then we will deal with you accordingly. If you will not act to restrict military aide to the Tyhhreans, we would like to know whether or not to consider the Federation an enemy or an ally."

Argent rolled his eyes, a gesture of indifference to mask the strange feeling in the pit of his stomach as if he had just been caught with his hand in a cookie jar, "Picking sides just won't do. Earth doesn't get involved in Martian politics."

"You're already involved, Mr. Argent. Your arms industry stands to gain another one hundred and twenty eight billion dollars off this war, particularly Wayland-Mackenzie and the other robot manufacturers... or have you forgotten that the AT-659 patent was awarded to Wayland-Mackenzie and Macrosoft Inc. by the IBC this past year?"

"I've always been candid with you, so I'll be candid with you again." Argent sat up a little straighter in his chair, "Once again you come in here whining about the Tyhhreans or Omanians or the Bassilians, and all you have to present me with are petty complaints. The last war, if you can even call it a "war," the Mayans were fighting for independence from the..." And he chuckled, "Corporate-Nazi Bassilus Empire, wasn't it? Did you come to me complaining about the civilian casualties? How about the property losses? The shift of the power balance? Refugees, starvation, famine... any of those? Of course not, you came and complained about the fact that the Bassilian Navy was built right here in America."

Marriott took a long slow breath, and tried again, "You fly the flag of free trade as your companies maraud across the planet, aggressively driving local competitors out of business. In Tyhhrea you supply them with weapons and ammunition to fight their wars against their neighbors, strengthening your tactical control of your international puppets."

"That's not true at all, Ambassador. Remember, we pressured the corporations to deny contracts to Bassilus when Maya declared independence."

Marriott frowned. "The Mayan Revolution..."

"...was nothing Ambassador. Mars has never had a _real_ war. You send an army of robots and self-programmed tanks and fighters, bombers and ships and program them to kill the enemy's robots, tanks, fighters and ships. The Mayan Revolution was no revolution, it was just a destructive and useless game. Barely a hundred people on either side were killed to hostile fire."

"Game?" Something in his expression turned from disappointment to a seething rage, something Argent had not expected nor could he explain, "You think this is a game, Jason?"

"Isn't it? The robots are doing all the fighting. So far all reports haven't listed more than a dozen casualties on either side."

"We're obviously reading different reports." Marriott stepped back from the desk and sat down slowly in the chair in front of the desk, at once causing the hairs on the back of Argent's neck to stand on end. This was a man who never seated himself in any circumstances unless his anger was at risk of boiling over into violent expression. "Tyhhrean media insists that it's robot against robot on all fronts. This is true in many situations, but once they get through the android military, they sweep into urban areas and target specific groups of civilians."

Argent poured mentally through the reports he had read in the last week, but sadly the quality of his memory was far inferior to his Martian counterpart. "Like what civilians, specifically?"

Mariott's face darkened. "I'm not at liberty to discuss those details now. Suffice to say, what's happening now in Narraganset and Memania is nothing short of an ethnic cleansing campaign."

"I see." Argent hadn't expected an accusation of this type, for that matter he hadn't even expected Marriott to know anything about _that_ subject. The fact that he did was a two-fold curse; if Marriott knew about it, surely the Martian Allied Government knew about it as well and had already put plans in motion to intervene.

And even more troubling was Marriott's choice of words. There was only reason why Marriott would possibly equate the Narraganset Campaign with ethnic cleansing... "You act like it's a human rights issue, but you haven't shown me anything but vague accusations. According to all official reports, the only ones who stand to loose anything are androids. If they have a problem, let _them_ complain about it."

Marriott sighed heavily, and stood up again. "I've wasted my time."

"Come off it, Ambassador, don't be that way."

The Martian Ambassador turned towards the doorway, leaving the office under a veil of disappointment. "You just don't get it, Jason, that's all."

"What is there for me to get? You're not making any sense."

Marriott paused at the doorway and glanced over his shoulder, "This conflict has been going on for four months. Two thousand people have lost their lives needlessly, and the Omanian and Tyhhreans has no motivation to cease this aggression with a limitless supply of androids being shipped to them from Earth. So I came to you asking you... no, _begging_ you to stop supplying them in such a way."

"They're only robots, Marriott," Argent said, choosing his words carefully to make sure his suspicions were correct, "We don't tell them how to use them, we just sell them to whoever wants them. If the Tyhhreans want to take their robots and throw them into the sea, that's their right. If they want to hunt down and destroy the Narraganset machines, that's their right too. There's no law against destroying androids, is there?"

Scowling, Marriott stormed out of the office in disgust.

Minister Argent had seen enough. It was disturbing to know what he did now about the Ambassador; for ten years they had been opposites on a table of interplanetary, international politics. They had met as counterparts, as colleagues, even as rivals... now it seemed Marriott represented something far more sinister. He regretted this turn of events, but he knew what had to be done. "Samantha," He said, calling to his secretary in the next room, "Connect me to Mr. Russo on Mars."

"Regarding, sir?" She chimed back,

"Tell him it's about Dan Claude."

The Ambassador had no more time to be annoyed with his business minded American counterpart. Too many things were at stake now and, he knew, war was now inevitable.

Argent could care less. War was always good for business in the Earth Federation, and anything that was good for business was always the first order of business.

The Ambassador's limousine was riding the elevator down the side of the tower city. It was almost a thousand feet from Argent's office to the lower levels where the Olympius Embassy was neatly tucked into a row of buildings on the second shelf. Three thousand feet below them, beyond a protective energy curtain keeping the weather at bay, the city of Chicago stretched out for thirty miles from the lakefront to the farthest city limits and suburbs, ants at the feet of the Tower City in the middle of what had once been a thriving downtown area. And above them, a gigantic shaft at the top of Tower City reached three hundred miles into space; the orbital elevator that stood as well as hung from a completely different city in geostationary orbit.

Through the massive floor to ceiling windows of the elevator, Marriott took it all in and froze the image in his mind. The prosperity of Tower City was unparalleled; the newest machines, the best computers, the highest standard of living, the most comfortable lifestyle anywhere in the solar system. And just beyond the walls of the Tower City, seven million people shuffled about in stifling poverty, operating factories and hydroponics farms, retail shops that rarely had any business. Most of them were hard at work recycling scrap materials from Tower Chicago, rebuilding old discarded machines and salvaging any usable parts, only to ship those parts back up to Tower City to be sold again as a new product. No one in the Towers even bothered themselves with manual labor; even their engineers only designed the new machines, leaving it up to the Groundlings to build and maintain them.

The blue collar underlings worked like slaves and the giants of the Tower stood on their shoulders.

Marriott never let himself forget this view, a city of unparalleled wealth standing on the shoulders of unparalleled poverty. This was the end product of Federated Capitalism, the condition of the entire planet at present, where the wealthy made footstools of the powerless, bought and sold their lives, their families, even their own identities on the open market. The entertainment media was dominated by the aristocrats in Tower City; and as such even the most intuitive of the groundlings could never imagine another way the system could ever work.

"Do you see that, Royko?" He said to his driver, equally lost in the view.

The limo driver looked through the giant window of the elevator, almost to the point of stepping out of the car to see it more clearly. Marriott beat him to it; he opened the back door and walked to the edge of the elevator, put his hands on the glass. "What do you think?"

The driver walked up next to him and joined him, taking in the entire scene. "It's an amazing view... depressing though."

"Why is it depressing?"

"It's so..." Royko tried to figure out what it was that bothered him about the scenery; eventually it came to him, "It's so _grey_. No color, no variety, just one big sprawl."

"It's not like back home." Marriott admitted, "You're used to a city full of life and energy, people who know what they want out of the future. What you see now is a city that has no future and a people who could care less."

Like the ambassador, Royko burned the image into his brain. "And this is what they're trying to spread to Mars?"

"They believe free enterprise and total capitalism is the ultimate form of government. Down there," He gestured to the city below, "It's the same as here in the Tower. Everything is privately owned, from firemen to politicians and everything in between. So why do you think it's so different down there from inside the Tower?"

Royko didn't have to guess. "Because the companies outside the Tower are smaller. They don't have the resources like they do out here."

Marriott shook his head. "That's what they tell people, but the truth is the same people who own all the services and utilities on the outside live _inside_ the Tower. As a result all utilities are sub-standard, simply because they reap the maximum profit from those poor bastards down there. They keep the best services for themselves with a minimal profit margin, and still get rich off the sweat and blood of the groundlings."

Royko stared at the ambassador in disbelief, "There's no way that can be legal."

"On this planet it is. They pillage the Groundlings almost daily. And don't forget, Royko, that all the wealth you see in this Tower City was acquired at someone else's expense."

"I suppose that's why you've been fighting so hard against the economic reforms back home?"

Marriott nodded. "They say privatization will be good for the economy. Of course it will. But when you look at things like this..." He looked out at the sprawling city for the last time, his stomach boiling in disgust, "You realize that the economy is not always good for the people." He felt the elevator started to slow down in its descent. He walked back to the limousine and climbed back inside.

Royko started back as well, but Marriott then did something unexpected, "Stay there," He said through the window, just stay right over there."

"Ambassador, we have to..."

_Douglass,_ The voice echoed in the back of Royko's head. An electronic signal, he realized, straight from Marriott, coded and untraceable, _I'm copying a file to your personal computer. As soon as you get it, transfer the file to the address listed. It's in the city, the Hillside neighborhood. Stay there and await contact from an agent from M.I.C._

Royko didn't understand, but for the moment gave up trying. He simply waited a few moments as Marriott uploaded a file onto the personal computer on his wrist, then nodded across the short distance where the Ambassador sat anxiously. Without a driver, the engine of the car started. The massive double doors began to open onto the second shelf and the miniature city stretched out on its platform, six miles from end to end.

The limousine shot forward suddenly, driven by remote from Marriott's own brain and surged between the double doors. And just as soon as the limousine was in the open a long string of luminous blue pulses rained down on it from a distant rooftop, sliced through the metal of the roof and hood, tearing the car to pieces. It skidded to a stop on its bearings, and still the assault continued. In the last few moments the string of pulses from the assassin's weapon focused on the rear compartment, melting and smashing it at the same time, ultimately punching through the fuel cells on the bottom of the car which in turn erupted into a plume of white vapors around it.

His mission accomplished, the assassin's weapon fell silent and the distant calls of police sirens now filled the air.

Dougless Royko rushed through the expanding cloud of vapors, pulled off what was left of the rear doors, staring through the fog for any sign of his charge.

He found Marriott in pieces, scattered about the inside of what was left of the car in a most peculiar way; where there should have been organs and entrails there were cables, tubes, bits of electronics and circuitry large and small, all of a configuration and type Royko had never in his life seen before. The ambassador's head was the largest remaining fragment, and even that had been cleaved in two by the assassin's weapon leaving only a piece of skull that more resembled the braincase of an industrial android than a human being.

Royko didn't quite know what to make of this, other than the fact that Marriott—with his usual insight—had seen this coming well in advance. That being established, he quickly departed the scene, away from the smoking limousine and the chaos that now rose to being as police officers and firemen surrounded the vehicle.

And left to his lonesome, he tapped a command on his wrist computer and opened the file Marriott and left him only minutes earlier.

* * *

Newtype Alpha Productions is proud to present this humble little fanfic by Mishalla (N-Xi) and Kai (N-Alpha). It's been on the back burner for some time, and we've even thought of adapting it for publication as a novel. **Either way, reveiws are needed and in large number! **


	2. Chapter 1

_Here and beyond he suffers. The wrong-doer suffers both ways. He suffers and is tormented to see his own depraved  
behaviour._ (Dhammapada 1 - the Pairs)

**

* * *

Chapter 1**

It was only a temporary exchange program through Interpol, a nation-to-nation transfusion of law enforcement expertise designed to benefit both parties. Realistically, there was little that could be learned from an exchange between the United States of Olympius and the hyper-capitalist United Earth National Federation. The eight month transfer of the young hulking detective from Chicago to Saint Lowell had only proved this point. His eight month stay had been a culture-clash of massive proportions, a collision of civic values, and ultimately an illustration of the social gulf between the old world and the new. The two worlds were separated by a nether region, a gap that could not be bridged, in which Detective Ross Syllabus currently hovered.

This "temporary" assignment was now into its ninth year, and no end in sight in the foreseeable future. So much the better, Detective Syllabus had no intention of leaving. Saint Lowell Police officers noted him as a slightly above average cop, descent cook, lousy singer, average dresser, and somehow the only man in the 6th Precinct who knew how to use the old fax machine on the third floor. The only thing about him that stood out was his size: he was cut like a champion body-builder and towered over the next tallest officer in the precinct by more than nineteen inches. In his years since transferring to Saint Lowell from the Chicago police, he had picked up more than a dozen nicknames and at least as many parody acts from his closest friends. But underneath it all, average as he was in performance, he was one of SLPD's most respected lawmen.

And after nine years, he was as much a citizen of Olmypius as a born-and-bread native.

Chief Danford saw him coming down the hallway, towering over the other two detectives walking in front of him as the three of them stepped into his office and took their seats in front of his desk. Even now he had come to wonder if Ross was unusually tall or everyone in the station was unusually short. Or both. "I'm sure you guys heard the news."

"It's all over the TV, chief," Detective Jefferson said, seated on Ross's left, with the rookie to the precinct, a baby-face named Raphael DeSoto sitting on his right, "First there's Ambassador Marriott, then two days later we get Senator Marian and Senator Horace in the same hit, and now this morning Bill Harley from Veritech..."

"And you all know what the news doesn't report, thanks to the gag rule." Danford said coldly.

Raphael nodded. "All of them were androids. I got the specks on Harley from the M.O.P.D., they're no ordinary machines."

"What's different about them?" Danford said, leaning forward.

Raphael sighed, "We don't really know. All the bodies we find are so badly torn up there's no much left to examine. What we do know is that a major component is some kind of a mercury-based poly alloy, not quite solid but not quite liquid."

"And there's one other thing," Detective Syllabus broke in, "The skin is made up of some new carbon-fiber material, softer than rubber, stronger than steel."

Danford squinted at him. "Like how strong?"

Syllabus frowned. "M.O.P.D. says it's better than bullet proof. It'll probably stand up to a twelve-gauge round at any distance but point blank."

"What about hyper velocity and flechetté rounds?"

Jefferson shrugged. "They should still be effective... but why? We're after the killer, right? Not the new androids..."

"There's a reason these kinds of specs are illegal for civilian androids, and now all of a sudden these things are popping up all over the place. Better safe than sorry."

Syllabus nodded, "I know what you mean, but Ambassador Marriott had that position for almost fifteen years. There's no way to know how long it's been since he was replaced by an android... assuming he wasn't an android to begin with."

Danford sighed. "Well there's something else that bothers me."

Jefferson took a stab in the dark, "The assassin's using an advanced new assault weapon, so obviously he knows who they are and how to kill them..."

"So he might actually be _one_ of them." Danford finished, "In which case apprehending him becomes a real bitch."

Syllabus nodded in agreement, but felt the subject moving into more practical matters. "So any idea why Martian Collective Intelligence is sending spooks?"

"No idea," Danford said grimly, "All they said was they're sending two field agents for a special assignment, no details on it. I assume those two will give us the run down, but..."

"I don't trust MIC." Jefferson said, "They always pull the strings but they never give you the whole story."

"That's what makes them spooks," Danford said. "In any case—Ross and Ralph are gonna have to baby sit em until this whole thing blows over. You two think you can handle them?"

"It's not a question of handling them," Raphael sighed, "And why aren't they coordinating with Central Headquarters? 6th Precinct is..."

"Who knows?" The phone began to ring on Danford's desk, "They're MIC, so I'm betting they didn't want anyone to know they're here. Or..." He picked up the handset of the phone and listened for a moment, then grunted and hung up again, "It's that time again."

"Another cross?" Syllabus stood up, sighing, "Chief, why do we even bother? It's petty vandalism at best."

"Petty or not, it's still against the law. Move your ass, Ross."

"Fine, whatever." Syllabus turned and left the office, moving down the hall to the elevator. _I'm getting tired of these demonstrations,_ He thought, calling the elevator to the parking garage, _There are some sick-ass people in this town..._

"'Or...' what, chief?" Raphael said after Ross had left.

Danford blinked, "What?"

"About the field agents... 'they don't want anyone to know they're here, or...?'"

He had hoped to be spared from going down this road, but Raphael was a certified genius and there was little anyone could get past him. "Or," Danford said gravely, "Someone at HQ is a security risk."

* * *

For the millionth time she looked at the clock on the wall, ticking away the seconds oblivious to the plight of the world around it. A simple machine, no mind and no worries. Not a care in the world. Camille glared at it with envy. If she tried to explain to the antique grandfather clock the situation at hand and the fear burning in her breast that the unthinkable had happened, the clock would respond with the same mindless chime. It knew nothing but the time of day, nothing at all about Justin's fate, or the suspicious cry for help from Ginger Harrison, or the mysterious gunman hunting them all down one after another.

Camille sat on the couch with her knees tucked into her chest, her grandmothers' quilt wrapped around her shoulders. She thought of calling the police, but knew better. If Justin hadn't come home last night the police might already have him. But worse case scenario, if _he_ had found Justin first...

The door rattled violently from the pounding of a man's fist, wrapping on the door and shouting through the wood, "Camille! It's me! Open the door!"

Her heart did a back flip in her chest at the sound of Justin's voice. She was almost moved to tears with welcome relief as she tossed the quilt aside and sprang up from the couch, darted across the living room to the front door, secured by no less than three deadbolts and an electronic seal. She unlocked the door quickly and threw it open, smiling, "Justin I was...!" She froze, and time slowed to a halt.

A tall man in a black coat, red baseball cap and messy blonde hair sticking out from under it grinned at her like a viper. There was a sadistic air around him that made her blood run cold. He took one step into the house, and in a reflex Camille shoved him out; instead she found himself pushing against a human barricade, not budging in the slightest from any effort other than his own. "Well shit," He said, disappointed, "The brat's memory must be a little biased. He pictured you a lot better looking than this."

Camille turned and ran through the house, fueled by mix of panic and adrenaline. At the doorway to the kitchen a gunshot cut the air behind her. The bullet sliced through her left shoulder and she hit the ground and rolled to her back, screaming.

"I didn't give you permission to go anywhere!" The man tucked his gun back into the folds of his coat and swaggered into the kitchen with an amused smirk. He looked down on the wounded girl on the floor, eyes full of pain and fear. Lying there on the ground in such a way, his opinion of her changed, "How old are you, Camille?" He knelt down next to her, and with a flick of his wrist a switchblade knife sprang into his hand from somewhere inside the sleeves of his coat.

"T-T-Twenty two..." She said, gritting her teeth from the pain in her shoulder.

The tall man laughed, "Twenty two! You could have fooled me!" He opened the switchblade and pressed the blade against her neck, "Try again."

"Seventeen!" She shouted over the pain and fear, "Justin took me in cause of my family—"

"How stupid are you, Camille? Do you really think I haven't already copied his entire memory bank?!"

The thought of it put an end to her worry, and plunged her into a deep despair. Her eyes boiled over with tears. "What are you going to do with me?"

He popped the knife back into its hiding place in his sleeve, then gently, carefully, gathered a fistful of fabric of Camille's blouse into his hand. In an action to quick for her to follow or even feel, he ripped the blouse away from her like a sheet of thin paper, tossed it over her shoulder. Another identical action and her shorts followed, then her underwear, and with a start she found herself suddenly unable to breathe with the tall man's hand clamed around her throat, "You're a smart girl. Figure it out."

Somehow she managed a desperate sob.

The tall man chuckled, and spoke to her in Justin's voice, "Look babes, I'm in town on a really boring mission. I don't really like this city, and I don't care for you much either. But you know what they say..." And he continued again on his own voice, releasing her throat and letting her take one massive panicked gulp of air, "I work and hard, and I play hard..." He reached up and pinned her wrists to the kitchen floor, kissed her, and added, "Not necessarily in that order..."

* * *

Two squad cars were already there by the time Syllabus arrived on the scene, along with a Patti-wagon and an ambulance whose services were not yet needed. He noted with irony that years from now, someone flipping through a newspaper might happen upon a photo of this scene and forget the context; such a person would become extremely alarmed. Mitsuo Tanaka was one of the wealthiest men in Saint Lowell, a businessman of the highest class and CEO of Earth's famous Honda Robotics Inc. Just why the cream of the crop from Earth's corporate elite felt the need to take up residence anywhere but Earth was simply unexplainable, but as the president of a major industrial android and military robot manufacturer, his house was massive and so was the property it was situated on. Everything in it was state of the art, from the helicopter on his roof to the ring on his finger.

All things considered, the twenty foot wooden cross burning on his front lawn was more than a little out of place considering this glitzy estate and its pampered resident. The cross itself was actually made of plywood, doused in rocket fuel to make it burn hotter; this was partially for dramatic effect, but primarily—as Syllabus immediately confirmed at a glance—for the benefit of the android the mob had crucified on it before setting it ablaze. The skin was melted away but much of the skeleton remained, though he could see from here the parts that had been damaged in the attack. She'd been shot, stabbed, kicked, dragged, run over any number of times with any number of vehicles and undoubtedly raped by whoever might have felt the urge. With the rocket fuel still cooking off, the chances of taming the blaze were about one in four thousand; as usual, the fire department merely contained the flames and waited for it to die.

Syllabus found Tanaka sitting on the hood of one of the police cars, staring at the cross as it burned itself out, brooding silently over the incident. He tapped him on the shoulder and sat down next to him, "Detective Syllabus," He said, "SLPD."

"You know who I am," Tanaka said, "You here to file a report?"

Syllabus nodded. "Standard procedure, of course. I also have to file a confirmation to your insurance company."

"Rosie wasn't insured," Tanaka said, "I never really needed it... I guess right now I still don't."

Syllabus nodded again. With a man as wealthy as Tanaka, an insurance policy for android property was a comical waste of time. Even the warrantee was probably a joke to him. "What type of unit was she?"

Tanaka smiled, "She was an angel."

Syllabus waited a moment or two, then repeated the question in the exact same tone of voice.

Seeing the detective's disposition, Tanaka relented. Syllabus rolled up his left sleeve and typed in the data on an LCD screen on his wrist computer just as quickly as Tanaka could speak it to him, "I built her by hand in my own workshop. She's registered as a variant of T-651-M12D."

"How much did she cost?"

"To build or appraised?"

"Both." Syllabus's hand hovered over the LCD keypad.

Tanaka thought for a moment, "Her parts cost just over half a million dollars. But a unit with her specs usually sells for four or five million."

Syllabus typed it into his computer, then added, "I'm gonna need those specs for the record, by the way."

Tanaka knew them from memory, "She's five foot five inches tall, weights two hundred and eighty pounds. She has an output of 7.4 kilowatts, a Macrosoft Quantium-IV processor 219 gigahertz, 170 terabytes of ram. Operating temperatures between -50 and 140 Celsius," He paused a moment and let the detective catch up, then gave him the rest, "She has... she _had_ 97 anatomical articulation, and a Class-Ten rating in both physical and emotional response. Her measurements are 33B-21-32, she's ticklish behind her knees, her favorite color is blue, her favorite movie is Blade Runner..."

"That's all I need, Mr. Tanaka," Syllabus said, finishing the last of the data before the old man could foist on him anymore meaningless trivia, "So what's next for you? Do you plan to build a replacement?"

"That's what I've been sitting here thinking about," He rubbed his chin, his mind several miles away, "If I do, then of course I get my Rosie back and I don't have to worry about getting lonely. But you know, there's some sentimental value attached..."

"How can you get sentimental for a robot?" Syllabus almost meant it as a rhetorical question, but for Tanaka it was hardly rhetorical.

"We get attached enough to inanimate objects. I still remember the teddy bear I had when I was four. Why is it so unusual to get attached to something that looks and acts exactly like a real human?"

Syllabus dismissed the idea; he was in no mood for a philosophical debate, especially with the burning frame of the android still dangling over their heads. "Mr. Tanaka, were you performing sexual activities with that robot?"

"Of course I was." Tanaka said without hesitation, "And I don't care of it _is_ illegal, it's a stupid law. Believe it or not I do love Rosie and if there's anything left to salvage from her memory bank, I'm going to upload it into a replacement and I'm gonna fuck her digital brains out." He turned to Syllabus with a defiant grin, "You have a problem with that?"

Syllabus grinned, "I've always wondered why people do that. Is it some kind of fetish or something to sleep with a hunk of metal and plastic? What can they do that humans can't?"

"For one, those androids are a hell of a lot more rational." Tanaka said with a slight hint of pride in his voice, "Rosie doesn't suffer from mood swings like my ex-wife, she doesn't lie, she doesn't cheat, and she always puts things in perspective for me. She never gets bored with me and she never gets tired of me."

"Of course not," Syllabus said, unimpressed, "You programmed her not to. That's the reason for the law; people forget how to have real relationships when they get dependent on pre-programmed girlfriends who never complain and never argue."

"You think Rosie never complained?" Tanaka laughed out loud, "I tell you, Detective, that woman—"

"That robot." Syllabus corrected.

"That _woman_," Tanaka repeated, "Has never lost an argument since the day she was activated. Somewhere on the internet she picked up a manual on the fine art of debate, now I can barely keep up with her."

"I'll take your word for it." Syllabus was being kind. He had every confidence that Tanaka was so infatuated with his creation that he would have attached a halo and a pair of wings on a simple whim.

"Besides, Detective, modern androids like Rosie use a "ghost" system, a fractal circuit completely different from the old digital computers. The name comes from the fact that their behavior is so dynamic that our best programmers swear there's some kind of 'ghost in the machine.' Besides, I couldn't possibly program _all_ of her behavior, in the only things I could design into Rosie were things for her own enjoyment."

Syllabus squinted at him, "Really? Like what?"

"Originally I designed her with a sweet tooth," Tanaka said with a grin, "That didn't last more than a day or two, but it evolved into one of her hobbies..." His eyes glazed over and his mind drifted off again down memory lane, "Rosie likes to experiment with pastries. She made me some cup-cakes the other day that—"

"Article 15, Paragraph 10 of the National Ordinance forbids the use of sentient robotic devices, namely androids, as a means to fulfill sexual gratification. Maybe it _is_ a stupid law, but it is also an important social law," Syllabus abruptly ripped Tanaka out of his mental wandering, the implicit threat of a trip downtown in handcuffs, "They don't want humans to abandon normal relationships for a race of sex-droids."

Tanaka shrugged, "What difference does that make? People who are just looking to get laid don't want any strings attached, so they might as well do it the safe way and pick up an android babe. But folks who want to start a family aren't just in it for the sex."

"Regardless, it helps keep the birthrate from dropping."

"But Androids can't have babies." Tanaka said, "So people who want kids can't waste their time with androids."

At the new line of thinking, Syllabus became agitated. "And what if they could?" He glanced at Tanaka and asked, ponderously, "How much of a market is there for something like that?"

"Like what?"

"An android that could conceive children. You know, with some of the nanotech stuff they've been playing with that could be right around the corner."

Tanaka grinned. "I can tell you now that the first person who tries it will be simultaneously an instant success and an instant failure. Sure, the potential market for that kinda thing is bigger than you could ever imagine, but the profits you'd make would be equal to your legal fees from all the lawsuits."

Syllabus stood up again, took a few steps closer to the crucified robot in its fiery execution. "Tell me, Tanaka," He said wistfully, "Have you ever wondered if robots have souls?"

"Personally, I don't have to wonder," Tanaka walked up behind him, staring up at his destroyed android companion with sadness in his eyes, "Because I _know_ they do."

"Well if they do, what do you suppose they'd make of this?" Syllabus pointed to the cross, "You think androids know what martyrs are?"

"For your sake, Detective, I sure hope not."

"My sake?"

"Yep." Tanaka grinned, "When a revolution comes, authority figures like yourself are always first on the chopping block."

* * *

At first glance they could have passed for a pair of street punks. The older of the two, a skinny man with messy, uncombed dark hair, tattoos covering his arms and the parts of his chest exposed by the shabby t-shirt and leather jacket, decorated with chains around the shoulders and waist with a picture of a little red demon sewn into the back of the jacket. His companion was even more outlandish; a short woman with short blonde hair, dressed in a less-than-modest black crop top, small red jacket and red short-shorts, steel-plated boots just short of knee-high, and what appeared to be a leather dog collar around her neck. There were no officers escorting them, and the clerk at the desk seemed indifference to their presence. He stood in the doorway to the lobby for half a minute, watching and waiting to see what business they had here, then overcoming skepticism approached them in a mask of neutrality, "Good morning," He said indifferently, "What can I do for you?"

The younger woman reached into some magically concealed pocket in her jacket and came out with a badge and I.D. card, "Special Agent Naomi Armitage, Martian Intelligence Collective."

Syllabus stared at her for a long moment, trying and failing to suspend his skepticism, then at her companion, who likewise displayed his own badge, "Jeremiah Ravencoft," The man said, "M.I.C., Division Twelve."

Again he stared at them, trying to size them up, even as understanding dawned on him, "Both of you from Division Twelve?"

Armitage nodded. "Normally we don't get involved in cases like this, but in an overdeveloped urban area like Saint Lowell..."

"You might be a little out of your element. I thought we were after a professional assassin? Division Twelve mainly infiltrates drug cartels and street gangs..."

"We're specialists in cyber-warfare, that's why they called us in." Jeremiah said.

"You're cyborgs?"

Jeremiah nodded, "We're with a special task force assigned to android-related activities. Puppet bombings, surveillance, ghost-hacking, that sort of thing."

Syllabus looked them over for a moment at the same time he sampled Jeremiah's accent, "You're Palestinian, aren't you?"

Jeremiah smiled. "No, I'm Hesperian. But I do get a lot of assignments in Palestine."

"I see. They say they have the best beaches on the planet." Syllabus glanced in Armitage's direction, "What do you think?"

"I wouldn't know. Never been there," She said curtly, "You have a meeting room set up?"

Syllabus nodded and lead them out of the lobby, through the security door and down a hallway towards the large meeting room near the center of the police station, "You two look a little young to be MIC."

"Appearances can be deceiving." Jeremiah said.

Syllabus turned around in the corridor and squared off in front of them. "Try me."

Armitage stepped forward, looked him up and down for a moment, then looked up at his face utterly emotionless, "You're thirty-two years old. You were born on Earth, somewhere in the North American Southeast, and you have a serious caffeine addiction. Your right arm is prosthetic, so is your left leg and both of your eyes. Your hobbies include snowboarding, target practice, and binge drinking. You keep at least one pornographic magazine in your desk drawer and your lucky numbers are 15, 34, 17, 21 and 6."

Syllabus stood motionless for a long moment, petrified beyond words, afraid even to think lest the young field agent pluck his thoughts from his inner ear. After a long moment of silence he asked, "You wanna explain how you knew all that by looking?" He continued slowly to the meeting room, glancing over his shoulder all the while.

"The average height of a full grown Martian-born male is about sixty six inches. Immigrants between five and ten years old get stunted by the low gravity, but immigrants over ten usually retain normal growth patterns. You are exactly seventy six and a half inches tall."

Syllabus grunted. _Lucky guess. _"How about the caffeine thing?"

"Your left hand shakes, but your breathing is normal." Armitage said.

"And my arm?"

"Your right hand _doesn't_ shake, and it's five degrees warmer than your left."

Syllabus stared at his hands self consciously, _She could tell that by looking?_ "The eyes?"

"I can see the serial number on your corneas."

He blinked, suddenly self conscious, "How about the magazine."

Armitage grinned. "Lucky guess."

_Damn... then I just admitted it._ Syllabus kicked himself mentally and asked his final question, "How about my lucky numbers? How'd you figure that out?"

This time Armitage seemed visibly amused. "I'll tell you when you guess right."

* * *

Ali Baba was a truly rare type of establishment in one of the seediest neighborhoods in east Saint Lowell. In that way it was rather typical of neighborhoods in the east side of the "lower level" with its back to the Ganges Bay. The nature of the establishment itself negated the possibility of gaining any praise or nostalgia from either the newspapers or the general public; for the last android-free strip club in Saint Lowell was a lonely position of little if any prestige. On the other hand, its android-free status had given Ali Baba's manager a tremendously successful business. Human strippers were something of a novelty for the uptown suburbanites who wandered in every night, and the lack of android "models" meant avoiding all of the potentially crippling tax burdens (in Saint Lowell, the automated labor tax was 210 of an android's value, per every android in use. For models and strippers, the tax rate was 550—a 2 million dollar android-stripper would cost its management over 10 million dollars each year in taxes).

It was Friday night, with all the usual patrons and all the usual activity. The factory workers howled and whistled every minute of every show, some of them even continuing between shows. Frank Morris recognized all of his favorite customers sitting at the stages and the tables, even a few of the more rare appearances; a merchant captain from Albion who visited whenever he was in town, a few truckers who passed through almost every month, and even a prominent state official—Saint Lowell's only female District Attorney—sitting among four of her male colleagues as a girl named Selena stretched out on top of their table, flirting with all of them at once to the background of the tacky yet catchy techno music piped into the room from the deejay booth.

Standing behind the bar on the side of the room, Morris' wandering eye inspired a dazzlingly complex string of emotions; first anxiety as he remembered just a bit too late that Selena, sprawled out as eye-candy in front of the D.A., was underage by three years. Then came irritation with himself for failing to photograph the D.A. and her legal staff enjoying a table dance for possible blackmail use. And then—stronger than the others—a wave of suspicion as his eye caught onto a face seated across from the D.A. he had never seen before. The appearance of a stranger in his club was ordinarily nothing to worry about, but this character bothered him. The look on his eye watching Selena was one of recognition, as if he had seen her before, and gradually as her attention became more and more focused on him, it seemed possible that she had seen him before as well.

Morris shot a glance across the club to one the bouncers, who responded to the silent command instantaneously and appeared next to him no more than ten seconds later, "Louis, you see that guy over there talking to Lena?" He didn't need to raise his voice over the speakers on either side of the booth and around the club; the ex-special forces washout turned strip-club bouncer could read his lips.

Louis nodded, somehow spotting the man out of the corner of his eye without even looking in his general direction, "Across from the D.A. right?"

Morris nodded, "He looks like he knows her. Go see if he wants a drink or something."

"I hope you're planning any trouble Mr. Morris..."

"If he's a friend of hers or a relative, we could be in real trouble." Morris said, "Just go."

Louis walked off casually, gradually, picking up a beer from the bar and before wandering off towards an empty seat, two spaces down from the mystery man. He fell into his seat gracefully, and the moment she noticed him her body language stiffened ever so slightly, "What did I do, Louis?"

"Nothing much, I just came to spoil your fun." He said just loud enough for her to hear.

She didn't visibly respond, but rolled over on her belly and slithered backwards sensually, away from the mystery man so she could talk to without him hearing her, "Let me guess: the boss got jealous again?"

The mystery man chuckled, apparently hearing her anyway, "I don't blame him. I'd be jealous too."

Selena propped herself up and crawled back to her new friend, "Of course he's jealous. He's got a thing for me. He hates it when I find people in here I like."

"He likes em young too, does he?"

"Yeah." Then she remembered himself, "I'm not that young though."

"Younger than you look, we both know that."

Louis glanced at the man next to him, communicated with a glance that the man needed to part with either his chair or his life. Pressed with the decision, the man choose his chair; the two of them switched seats gracefully and Louis now tapped the mystery man on the shoulder, "Let me hook you up, pal. You want a beer or something?"

The mystery man shook his head. "The only thing I want is already on the table."

"This isn't that kind of club, buddy." Louis said automatically.

"It isn't?" The man folded his arms in disappointment, "Damn. And to think I brought all this money and now I don't know what to do with it. Maybe I should go find a Casino..."

"Money?" The sound of the word hit Selena's ears like a beautiful melody, by now halfway across the table, entertaining the D.A. and her friends again. She rolled on her back and slithered across until she was directly in front of him again, "How much?"

The mystery man reached into his coat and came up with two large money clips. Louis counted them at a glance: forty thousand dollars in each clip. He handed both clips to Selena, who immediately handed them back, "What kind of girl do you think I am? I aint no prostitute."

Reading between the lines, the mystery man handed the clips to Louis, who promptly stuffed them into his own pockets.

This time he got the results he wanted, "You're a real nice guy, I like you." Selena rolled off the table, dumping herself into the mystery man's lap and draping her arms around his shoulders, "How about we go back to my car so we can talk in private, okay?"

"What a wonderful idea! Let's go have a talk!" The mystery man said, and pushed the chair away from the table as Selena lead him to the back of the room.

Louis watched them leave, then counted off twenty-two thousand and put them in a different pocket; Selena's cut for when she was done with her new friend.

* * *

The video showed three people in the frame, two large men running down the hallway and a younger woman fleeing them. One of them dove at the edge of the frame and caught her by the ankle, tripping her to her face, then dragged her quite intentionally back into view of the security camera, struggling and kicking at him even as his companion re-entered the frame and opened his trench coat, reaching into the folds. "These are the only two known culprits," Armitage froze the image for a moment and zoomed in on their faces, each opening in a separate holographic window in mid-air, "The first has been identified as a combat-enhanced T-640G, patent by Macrosoft industries. He's an unregistered unit, probably a scrap heap construction, but analysis shows a renewed poly-carbon enamel skin so he's clearly been upgraded recently." She focused her attention on the other suspect in the opposite window, "This appears to be the ring leader. We have no information on him whatsoever. All sensor data suggests he is a new class of android very similar if not identical to the types he's been actively destroying."

She let the detectives get a good look at their faces. The older robot was a rather dull looking character, square jaw and bland features, emotionless vacant eyes that had come to be typical of the T-6 generation. The other, clad in a large trench-coat and black beret, looked perfectly human, a sadistic smirk fixed to his lips. Much of his face was masked behind a sloppy curtain of short blonde hair, through which Detective Syllabus could just make out the glint of a nose-ring.

At length, Armitage closed the two windows and played the tape again. The older robot yanked their intended victim to her feet, grabbed her by the wrist and twisted her arm painfully against her own shoulder. She struggled and clawed against them even as the newer of the two robots pulled from the folds of his trench coat an unfamiliar weapon, squarish and stubby like a sub-machinegun, but more streamlined, and a glow from a panel on one side that Syllabus immediately recognized as some kind of LCD screen. The woman froze solid at the sight of the gun, then flew into a futile panic as she found herself suddenly staring down its oversized muzzle. She tried and failed to free herself from the grip of the T-6, but all in vain; the gunman pulled the trigger, and a string of luminous blue pulses leapt from the barrel of his weapon, tearing through the woman's body every bit the same as a bullet would, though exiting again through her skin as jets of fire. He held the trigger for a long burst until there was very little left of his victim, but when the smoke cleared and the flashes from his weapon gone, all that remained was a pile of metallic bits, fibers and cables, dark-grey tissues and tiny transistors, circuit conduits and diodes mingling in a smoldering pool of thick red fluid disconcertingly similar to human blood. The only thing left of the victim that could be discerned was her head, even with half of her face torn away to reveal the well-machined metallic skull underneath.

The shooter looked up cynically and smiled at the camera as if nodding to a pleased audience. Without so much as a hint of remorse, he bent down and picked up the woman's head by the scalp and calmly walked back down the hallway from whence they'd come.

"The official story," Armitage said, stopping the playback, "Is that Patrick was hospitalized due to drug overdose. But the killer also has a copy of this tape and may try to broadcast it, which will be a disaster for the record company. The point, however, remains that Maria Patrick, as far as any of us can tell, has _always _been an android."

Chief Danford shook his head in disbelief. "She's maintained a solid singing career for almost eight years. My daughter's a big fan. How in the hell did anyone not figure it out?"

"These new androids seem to be very different from the standard models. The most advanced T-6 android, the 659 series from Honda Robotics, uses a ghost processor, so behavior wise are rather similar to humans. But even the 59 can be identified by external appearance, composition, body language, or other signs. These new models can perfectly match human movements and mannerisms, appearances, even emotions. Every body structure of a human being is duplicated with a mechanical counterpart—body hair, skin, tissues, filters, nervous system, endocrine systems, blood, sweat, even tear ducts. They are, in the truest sense of the word, completely artificial humans. They can even exceed human responses in a few ways."

"When you say exceed," Raphael said, "You mean...?"

Jeremiah cleared his throat, "The major stumbling block of the T-6 is the heavy body weight from its titanium frame. The lightest is the 642-D7, used by the modeling industry. The lightest configuration weighs just over three hundred pounds."

"Modern androids," Armitage jumped in, "Have powerful actuators in the legs and feet to compensate for the increased weight, but despite it all of the T-6s still have a very heavy, conspicuous walk. The new androids can not only match human agility, but should be capable of spectacular agility. There's no way to be certain, but we estimate the new androids would have a top running speed in excess of thirty miles per hour, and a high jump of about ten meters."

Syllabus stiffened, "Is the body frame any lighter?"

"Somewhat, but still heavier than humans." Jeremiah said, "Maria Patrick was five feet tall. Her official weight was a hundred and three, but in actuality it would have been about twice that weight."

Raphael took a leap of intuition. "And I'm guessing physical strength and reaction time is better than the T-6, and maybe processing speed too."

Jeremiah nodded grimly. "Strength index is 60 greater than the T-659, and we estimate their top running speed to be about thirty-five miles per hour. We think they can sustain this speed for up to ninety minutes. Instead of actuators they use some kind of force-reflex membrane..."

Jefferson flinched, "Force-reflex what?"

"It's similar to the pressure membrane on modern space craft used to seal micro-meteor punctures. It's a soft fiber made up of tiny metallic cells that responds to modulated electromagnetic fields. The cells are interconnected with a large gap between them, but run a charge through them and they pull on each other, closing the gaps."

Raphael whistled in amazement, "So it's similar in principle to human muscle tissue..."

"Exactly," Armitage said, "Only the material used in the new androids is highly advanced, and the bonds between force-modules are reinforced... among other improvements. They can produce a staggering amount of pressure. "

"How much pressure?" Danford said.

She shrugged, "Theoretically, if they route enough power, a single android would have the strength of about twenty grown men."

Syllabus stirred uneasily. "So hand to hand combat is out of the question..."

"What about computing power? How much better are they?" Raphael had his notebook on his knee, ready to write it all down.

Jeremiah groaned monitor, "That's the one thing we don't know _anything_ about. The assassin usually takes their heads with them when he makes a kill. But based on the analysis from what was left of Ambassador Marriott's forehead, we're pretty sure the hardware is entirely different from current generation androids." He tapped the remote and put the rough data on screen, comparing side by side two diagrams of android bodies, one complete, one partial, "The T-659, for example, uses five microprocessors, each one running at 190 gigahertz with 160terabytes of active memory. Based on just what we've seen, these new androids could be running on a system with ten times the computing power."

Raphael whistled in amazement, "A supercomputer with muscles."

"The good news," Armitage said, "Is we don't think many of them have any software for hand-to-hand combat. If Maria Patrick knew anything about self defense, she could have mopped the floor with that T-640."

"Then it's safe to assume most of them won't cause much trouble on their own," Jefferson said with a hint of relief in his voice, "At least not at the moment."

"True." Syllabus added, "With all these killings it's likely the others will download some self-defense software of some kind. Basic close combat routines are fairly common, must gun stores sell em for cheap..."

Without any warning, Armitage changed the direction of the meeting, "It's important to recognize that so far, all of the victims have been androids, so there's little vested interest in the assassinations themselves. Our primary objective in this investigation is to locate the origin of these new androids, not to mention the objective and origin of the assassin in question."

Chief Danford cleared his throat, "How do we designate the mystery bots? We got a name for them yet?"

Armitage smiled. "Glad you asked. At MIC we don't have enough information about these robots, but they're completely different from either military variety or civilian variety models, so for now we've classified them as an undefined, "Third Variety." The assassin is being called Mr. X."

Syllabus raised a brow. "You seem to have a lot of information not to be able to classify them. Is the Third Variety really that different from conventional androids?"

"Believe me, detective," Armitage winked at him, "We've barely scratched the surface."

* * *

The first hint of Martian twilight danced on the horizon. Morning was on final approach.

Frank Morris flipped the large black switch on the wall, cutting the circuit breakers for the neon sign and external lighting for the club. The sun was already peaking over the horizon, and the last drunken despots of customers were wandering back to their lives. The District Attorney and her companions were among the last to leave; their car pulled out of the parking lot almost the same moment the outside lights clicked off and darkness descended on the club. The janitors went to work by now, mopping and sweeping the floors and the tables for the club's next opening, nine hours hence. Six in the morning was the start of most people's day, not so in the red-light district where Ali Baba hogged an entire street corner.

Morris left his assistant manager in charge of the cleanup and left through the door in his back office. He typed in the four-digit door code, and by the slamming of a pair hyper-allow bulkheads over the doors, his office locked itself so securely that a speeding bus couldn't break into it. Satisfied with the night's business, he started across the parking lot towards his car, yawning and going over the next-day's schedule in his head, _Got the new girl coming in to audition, tax papers to do, and then there's Jasmine's insurance form... to hell with Jasmine. Those damn kids of hers get sick every week; she should just toss em in the Ganges and..._ He stopped in the parking lot and stared in wonder; Selena's car was still in its parking space. The rear windshield was crushed, and the driver-side door was open.

"You gotta be shitting me!" He walked up to the side of the car with a cynical kind of grin, "Damn, Lena's not gonna be happy. This was her grandfather's car, wasn't it? She's not even listed on the insurance, and sure as hell isn't..." But when he was within arms reach of the car, he stopped and stared through the crushed back windshield, approaching more slowly and more anxiously. Carefully he poked at the driver's side door and opened it wider, poking his head inside...

What was left of Selena's head rolled out of the passenger seat and landed on the pavement with a metallic clank, the rest of her body tumbled out shortly behind it in a messy heap that Morris recognized immediately. As before, an amazingly complex series of emotions rushed through him, culminating in a sense of loss of an otherwise perfectly lovely young woman, coupled with disgust at her continuing deception. "That lying little bitch," He knelt down next to her remains and picked up what was left of her head. The top-right section of her scalp had been blown away, and the metal plating underneath that made up her skull was warped and punched inwards as if it had been melted. The rest of her body had been assailed in a similar fashion, both smashed and melted at the same time, with a wild mesh of circuitry and fibers dangling loose here and there from her broken, demolished form. "Now it makes sense. She told me she was underage so I wouldn't do a background check." Then his disgust disappeared, and for some reason turned into a sense of admiration, "You played me like a harmonica didn't you? I guess I brought it on myself."

He pulled one of the floormats out of her car, set it on the pavement and gathered her shattered body parts into a bundle, rolled them up and carried them in his arms. They were surprisingly light, but all the same it took him four trips to carry the remains of the former rising star of his club across the lot to the trunk of his car. "Maybe it wasn't a total waste," He said, cynically, "Robot shops pay good money for spare parts."

* * *

Detective Syllabus yawned widely as the elevator opened in front of him. He stepped into the lift and pushed the button for the underground parking garage, then yawned again. "Shall we do the math?" He went through the numbers in his head, then came to his conclusion as the doors opened on the ground floor, in the corner end of the hallway that opened into the station lobby, "No, they're definitely _not_ paying me enough for this shit."

The doors started to close again, but slammed shut just as an object wedged between then near the floor; the sensors cut in and the doors slid back open as Naomi Armitage stepped into the lift, arms loaded with what appeared to be a small file cabinet. "Going down?" She said.

Syllabus pushed the button again and the elevator dropped down two more floors. It was a short descent to the lowest level where the reserved spaces were located, but in just that short time he found himself staring intently at the young agent, "Is that heavy?" He gestured at the cabinet in her arms. It was made of steel.

Armitage shrugged, seemingly without difficulty despite the load in her arms, "Not very."

"I guess it wouldn't be. For a cyborg I mean." The doors opened and Syllabus waited for Armitage to step out first, then followed and wandered off in the direction of his own car. It had been a long day of file-pumping, dossier-cramming, video reviewing, mug shot memorizing, case familiarization, and what an elaborate case it was. Tomorrow they would start the "real" detective work, and until that time Syllabus wanted nothing to do with this government spook or her file cabinet.

And for this reason he was suddenly very surprised to find himself walking in the wrong direction—away from his car—towards where Armitage was attempting with some difficulty to open the back door of Jeremiah's van while still holding the cabinet in her arms. "Here, I'll give you a hand," He opened the door for her, intending it as a friendly gesture, but his body language betrayed something in the back of his mind even he hadn't perceived until an instant before Armitage detected it as well.

"Let's just make one thing clear, Detective," She carefully set the cabinet down in the back of the van, then closed the doors herself, "No matter how much you go out of your way to be nice to me, under no circumstances whatsoever will you be considered for a date. Got that?"

Syllabus nodded self consciously, "I didn't mean anything by it, just trying to be friendly."

"No, it's your instinct acting up. You see a healthy young woman, you scramble for brownie points. Doesn't take any conscious thought at all."

"Maybe..." Syllabus ran a mental self diagnostic and saw she was at least partially right. As much as he distrusted her, and even in a few disliked her, there was still a kind of mindless loyalty in his brain that only a beautiful woman could inspire. "Not that I was planning to ask you out or anything," He said lamely, "But does that mean 'thank you' is also off limits?"

Armitage stared at him for a moment, then sighed self-consciously at her own presumptions, "Thank you."

"Don't mention it." He started back towards his car, but watcher her as he went he saw her walking after him in the same direction, "Uh... you need a ride or something?"

"I've got one," She said, pointing ahead.

Syllabus noticed it as they got closer; his car was in the usual spot, sharing the space with a not-so-usual low riding motorcycle. There was nothing even slightly familiar in the machine, probably one of the many thousands of custom-designed bikes running around on the planet, "What kind of augmentations you have?" He found himself speaking without thinking, but somewhere in his sleep-deprived mind he realized he had been meaning to ask this question for some time.

"Compressed hydrogen turbines, seven-speed automatic transmission, twin ceramic motor drives, road-mapping radar, anti-lock brakes..."

"No, I meant _you_. Division Twelve is all cyborgs, right? What kind of augmentations do you have?"

"More than most," Armitage mounted the bike, but waited to start the engine, "Both arms and legs, both eyes, artificial ribcage and spinal chord, and a few organ replacements."

Syllabus laughed, "So what part of you _isn't_ artificial?"

"I'll tell you when you guess right."

"Naturally." Syllabus launched into his next question, disappointed not to have it answered on the first try, "So what happened to you? You did this on purpose or was there some kind of accident?"

"A little bit of both, I guess." She paused for a moment as he unlocked his car and slipped into the driver's seat, "How about you?"

Syllabus grinned, "You can already tell by looking, can't you?"

Armitage nodded smugly, "Of course, but I mean to ask _why_. There aren't a lot of cyborgs in local police nowadays."

"Remember the Mount Domingus Bombing back in the summer of '74? My fiancé and I were there on vacation when it happened."

"Really?" She put the key in the ignition and started the engine. The motorcycle began to purr, barely within the range of human hearing, "Were you close to blast point?"

Syllabus nodded, "The truck bomb was parked on the terrace right in front of the lobby. Me and Sarah were checking out when the damn thing went off."

"Damn." Armitage twisted the throttle slightly. The gently purring motorcycle roared like some mythical beast of fury, "So your fiancé died?"

"I wish." He laughed, and started his own engine. "Once she got out of the hospital she ran off and joined the same terrorist group that bombed the hotel."

"You're kidding!" Armitage looked up, a faint expression on her face somewhat resembling pity, "That sucks."

"Yep."

Armitage pushed the motorcycle out of the ample space between Syllabus's bumper and the wall, angled the front wheel towards the exit ramp. Syllabus leaned out of the window and called to her before she could leave, "Armitage,"

She glanced over her shoulder.

"I'm a little sensitive about this car getting scratched, so don't use my space anymore. When you come in tomorrow, use Detective Murphy's space, number 58."

Armitage squinted at him, "How does Detective Murphy feel about sharing a parking space?"

"If he ever comes out of his coma, you can ask him."

"Well, unlike you, I don't plan on sticking around here long enough for that." She winked at him playfully, then rocketed off towards the ramp, up and out of the parking garage on a motorized sprint to parts unknown.

* * *

His hands weighed fifty pounds each as he punched in the door code. The airtight steel door to his apartment slid back into the wall, then closed behind him as he staggered into his apartment, kicked his shoes off at the door, dropped his jacket a few feet further in, wandered towards the refrigerator to continue where he left off the night before, a 32-pac of draft beer he was by now about halfway through. This was his only hobby; when he was finished with this case, he would buy two more.

He wanted nothing more than to crash on his armchair and nod off to televised boredom, but first things first. He walked into his seldom-used bedroom and regarded the bathtub-sized aquarium against the wall next to the window. Shelly was amusing herself in the usual ways, swimming back and forth in the tank chasing the tiny robotic seal back and forth, up and down, batting one with the side of her head and sending it into a spin, batting the other with a flipper, then tucking into her shell as the seals seemed ready to retaliate. It was a game she played almost any time she was awake. If turtles could talk, Syllabus decided, Shelly would probably be laughing like a child on a playground. "You're awful lively tonight," A smaller bowl next to the tank contained Shelly's food: the tiny bluish-white "frost minnows" that Syllabus understood were basically overgrown microbes—one of Mars' only indigenous life forms. Argyre aquatic life brought from Earth had adapted almost overnight to this apparently abundant food source, and later to the seaweed and algae that festered in the shallow Argye waters.

The moment Syllabus dropped one of the frost minnows into the tank, Shelly spotted it out of the corner of her eye and raced across the tank, snatching it out of the water in an instant before it even had a chance to swim away. Syllabus dropped in another one on the opposite side, and again she stalked it down with the in-water speed only possible for an Agyre turtle. Then she turned and stared at him through the glass of the tank, and seemed to bow her head in thanks. "You're welcome." He said, leaving the little turtle to her game and heading back to his hobby.

The remote was sitting on the armchair as always, carving a permanent groove in the leather. For the millionth time he debated giving the voice-control feature a try, but again he resorted to the remote. The less A.I. he had in his life, he decided, the better.

It was too late at night for there to be anything on TV worth watching, so he turned to one of the various 24-hour news services for the usual punditry and political dribble. The story of the hour was now the story of every hour, the Tyhhreans attacking Narraganset. The usual babble included talk of the heavy civilian casualties in Narraganset's major cities and how the Tyhhreans had no casualties at all, their army comprised exclusively of android soldiers and battle robots. As Syllabus sat contently, gulping his beer, for a change there were a few new tidbits of information; a military analyst commented that the Tyhhrean war effort was supported largely by the Earth Federation, and by the Federation's largest ally the Bassilus Empire. Bassilus seemed about ready to enter the war directly, their naval fleet had nearly choked the life out of Memania and the Mayan Republic with an overwhelming naval blockade. Something had happened earlier in the day, Syllabus gathered from the pundits, some sort of incident between an Arabian cruiser and two Bassilus destroyers, in which the destroyers had ambushed the Arabian vessel as it climbed to avoid a thunderstorm and forced it out of the air, only to be sunk by the Arabian counter attack in Promethean waters off the coast of Palestine. The only other details Syllabus paid attention to was stronger and stronger statements from Olympus Mons demanding an end to the aggression.

"So it's gonna be a world war." Syllabus said, finishing the beer can and tossing it over his shoulder. That suited him just fine, he always fancied himself a wartime cop. But the thought of war, like everything else, had been a reminder to him of Domingus and the bombing that had nearly taken Sarah's life. He imagined she was somewhere in Seraphim by now, curled up in an abandoned building or run-down shack with a machinegun between her knees and a red bandanna around her forehead with her Japanese "war-name" written on the front. None of the pundits even mentioned the Seraphim rebels anymore, except the occasional reports of a car bomb or a hijacking by Seraphim rebels in a desperate but failed attempt to get the world's attention. Bassilus was carpet bombing them, their people were dying by the hundreds, and nearly everyone left alive there had either joined the militants or fled to Syrtis- Arabia (many of the refugees probably returned a few months later with weapons and ammunition).

That was Sarah's choice. There was bombs and terrorism, violence and murder, destruction and suffering—and then there was Ross Syllabus and the family life, the peaceful metropolis of Saint Lowell, the Christmas parties, the Aegean festivals, the Easter dinners, the Valentines candies, the Ramadan banquets. He supposed she had considered her life with him to be a casualty of the bombing, much the way he sometimes thought of her that way. But for the millionth time he tried and failed to understand the reason why—what had possessed her to join the terrorists, what's more, the very terrorist group whose truck-bomb had severed both of her legs and brought the rest of the building down on top of her head. "Maybe I'll never understand," He said, thinking out loud, and hearing with a bit of surprise the incredible weight of his words as they struggled to haul themselves out of his lips, "Maybe I'll meet Sarah some day and ask her why she..."

He fell asleep mid sentence. His head bobbed to one side and rested on his shoulder. Minutes passed and he began to snore, and a trickle of drool rolled down his cheek onto his shirt. It was rather fortunate he had fallen asleep when he did; in his sleep, he missed the words of a CNN terrorism correspondent, reporting live on a missile attack in a Bassilus airport that shot down a pair of trans-planetary shuttles as they approached for landing. The claim of responsibility was sent directly to CNN by videotape. It would have broken Syllabus's heart to hear Sarah's recorded voice played over national television, speaking on behalf of the Seraphim Democratic Front, admitting with pride to having slaughtered four hundred and fifty shuttle passengers in one fell swoop.


	3. Chapter 2

_All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing  
this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is; they all know the skill  
of the skilful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what the  
want of skill is._ -- Tao Te Ching  
**

* * *

**

**Chapter 2**

Raphael reset the parameters and ran another search. Syllabus was impressed, looking over his shoulder; the man was an amazingly fast typist. "Nothing from the Templars or Golgotha Crusade. Islamic Jihad and Red Zion come up negative too. There are two hits from a creationist website but both of them are fakes."

"What about the Marionettes?" Syllabus said, "This is should be right up their alley."

Raphael's fingers flew over the keyboard, entered the search into the police database, then shook his head. "Last four bulletins only mention puppet bombings in Syrtis and Palestine."

Armitage sighed, leaning against the desk behind Syllabus, "Well that was a waste of time. If it's not in your database it won't be anywhere."

Syllabus looked over his shoulder suspiciously, "Doesn't the MIC have a terrorist database of its own?"

"Of course. But when terrorists claim responsibility for attacks, they either go through the media or the police. Doesn't look like any of them are claiming it."

"There is one thing though," Raphael pointed to one listing on the screen, "The Bassilus Templars have vowed to hunt down whichever company is sponsoring these killings... obviously they're convinced it's a corporate hit."

Syllabus raised a brow. "In Bassilus?"

"Yeah. Apparently one of their top dogs was gunned down a few days ago."

"It hasn't been reported yet," Jeremiah said, "Her name was Ginger Harrison, a militant Pentecostal with the Templars. They found her with her head torn off in a Taxi cab outside Tifares."

Raphael grunted, "This guy gets around, doesn't he? Patrick was in Ithaca."

"Assuming there's only one of him." Armitage said, slightly ominously, "This killer may have human or android accomplices, or there might even be other Thirds working with him."

"To what end?" Raphael slouched in his chair, "Why would they run around hunting down other robots like this? Who's operating them?"

"For now all we can do is focus on what we know," Chief Danford seemed to appear out of nowhere behind them. "You've got MIC agents tracking down every possible lead in every city, correct?"

Jeremiah nodded. "Of course. That's why we're here. Some of our intelligence suggests we should expect an attack in Saint Lowell within the next few days."

"Any leads?"

Armitage reached over and tapped out a new search on Raphael's workstation, "We intercepted part of a telepresence conversation across the planetary navigation mainframe. The signal was scrambled with a really weird encryption, and the only part we could decode was a set of GPS coordinates and a transit code that with a partial address."

"I'm assuming the GPS coordinate was for somewhere in Saint Lowell," Syllabus said, "What about the address?"

"4103 Victory Street. There are five locations with this address, we scouted three of them last night. The other two aren't in Saint Lowell; one of them is in Greggerton, way too far from the coordinates, and the other is in the near suburbs."

Danford grunted. "When were you planning to check out the site?"

Armitage shrugged. "Any time will do. We checked the listing against the database; it's an old warehouse waiting to be torn down. We've had a satellite watching it for any signs of activity. So far, nothing."

"It's probably a dead end, but it's all we got for now," Syllabus said.

Raphael put his keyboard to work, calling up a satellite image and the building's floor plans from the city's archive, "No thermal activity, no motion, no electricity."

"It's been quiet like that for a week." Jeremiah said.

"That warehouse used to be an old factory before they were bought out by an American company," Jeremiah referred now to the blueprint, "It has three floors, a few offices and a lot of catwalks."

"Send the floor plans to my car. Let's take a closer look."

Syllabus stepped around Raphael's desk towards the elevator. Armitage followed just a step behind him, "Mind if I tag along, detective?"

"Sure. Just hope you don't bore easily."

Raphael shouted over his shoulder, "By the way, the building was last owned by the Bright Noah Shipping Company. Do you want the company information?"

"As soon as you can, Ralph," Syllabus stepped into the elevator, followed shortly by the outrageously dressed special agent. In the short descent to the underground parking garage, he couldn't help but ask, "Why are you dressed like that, anyway?"

"Dressed like what?" She said absently.

"No offense, but you look like some kinda rockstar's groupie. You stick out like a sore thumb in public."

Armitage shrugged. "When you're trying to spot an infiltrator, you're looking for someone who's trying to blend in. The ones who stand out are the first ones overlooked."

"If you're trying to infiltrate some mobster's compound and you show up dressed like that..."

"It's not the clothes that get you past security," Armitage winked at him as the elevator doors opened into the underground parking garage, "It's the attitude."

* * *

The area formally known as "Downtown Chicago" was not truly part of the Tower City's structure, but was in fact the only part of the old city privileged to be considered part of the Tower Elite; twenty support pylons surrounded an area almost ten miles across, each the size of a skyscraper in its own right, with the gigantic disk of the Fifth Shelf two thousand feet above their heads. No one at base level ever seriously worried about the giant structure collapsing on their heads. At most two thirds of them had to fail before the structural integrity was lost, and in that case the entire city would drift slowly into outer space, dragged skyward by the centrifugal force of the Earth's orbit on New Port, three thousand miles above their heads. The pylons kept up with subtle changes in altitude, telescoping and flexing ever so slightly to keep the Tower City from drifting too far from its place. 

Nearly a century had passed since the multinational military powerhouse that was Wayland-Mackenzie Inc. had moved its corporate headquarters to Downtown Chicago in the shadow of this monolith, its underside lighted by giant sunlamps by day, tiny lamps by night. The building they had chosen to grace with their new ownership was deceptively small, a conic glass building fifteen stories tall. The small size of the building was deceptive because of what the general public never saw: fifteen underground levels that included a small arsenal for the building's security forces, the Clarke/Lake station for the city's Blue Line train, and beneath it all a network of laboratories and machine shops carved into the bedrock twice as deep as the building was tall. Decades ago it was called the Thompson Center, now it was a fortress in which Foreign Minister Jason Argent stood, just inside the front doors beyond a security desk manned by a pair of T-6 androids of an uncertain type.

He walked to the edge of the railing and looked down into the sub-floor of the building. In the very center of the court-like floor, an ancient machine stood enshrined on a slab of rusty stone, painted and treated to resemble pre-terraformed Martian soil. It was about four feet tall, with an ivory-colored outer casing, strong angular arms and legs attached to a blocky, rectangular torso. The power cell on its back was a nuclear battery the size of a suitcase, attached by cables to an oval shaped head, transparent on one side as a port for a dizzying array of sensors and indicator LEDs. Argent recognized it without needing to be read the caption at the bottom of the monument: this was a deactivated T-530, the first autonomous humanoid built by Wayland Robotics—before the merger with Mackenzie Securities that made them corporate giant they were today. It was a kind of android Neanderthal, but seeing it somehow left Argent with a feeling of respect for the company that created it.

That, he decided, was the probably why it was there in the first place.

"Doesn't look like much, does he?" A voice said behind him.

Argent glanced over his shoulder. Jack Russo had met him in a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat, something Argent had always found distasteful but never commented on, "It looks like an eight-year-old in a space suit."

Russo chuckled, "That's what the New York Times said when they first saw it in action." He stood next to Argent, his eyes gleaming over with pride, "Wayland Robotics was slapped with a wall of skepticism. The top scientific minds in the world told us Mars was a waste of time. They told us our plan was stupid and arrogant. The JPL even released a report right before the first launch that in the best case scenario, the process of terraforming a planet like Mars would require no less than three hundred years."

Argent snickered, "We're still waiting on that deadline."

Russo grunted, "NASA was even worse, they told us it would take half a millennium..." Then he laughed, "Sixty years later, Mars had an ocean and the beginnings of an ecosystem!"

"And 530 made it all possible." Argent gestured at the little android on its monument, "In just that first year you sent half a million of these things up there, along with about fifty million tons of equipment. Of course, you forget that none of this would have been possible without machines like the Luminaries."

"Luminaries..." Russo scowled. The image of an ancient space craft flew through his brain riding the fireball of an—at that time—highly advanced plasma drive system. Cylindrical robot space craft loaded with sensors, grappler arms hundreds of feet long. Fully unmanned, and controlled by A.I.s that had more personality than the average human, the Luminaries were the largest and—even to this day—the smartest robots ever built by human hands. They alone had made the orbital elevators possible, they alone had built the first satellite colonies, they alone had sent back the first pictures of the moons and planets of a neighboring solar system. After more than a century of space exploration, Honda Robotics was still basking in the glory of the Luminaries, and because of that, Wayland-Mackenzie would always be that "other" robot company.

"Trash with wings." He said acidly, "Helping with the Mars Project was the only thing they ever contributed to the universe. After they were done, Honda stopped making them and the Luminaries just wandered the solar system like drunks."

"You forget the Beanstalks, and Sirius, and Ganymede, and Tiphares..."

"We would have done it ourselves not even five years earlier if the government wasn't so enamored with Honda's robots."

Argent looked up, through the hollow core of the building and the fifteen rows of floors and railings stretching up to the glass ceiling high above them, "I think you should give credit where it's due, and remember that Honda's robots captured enough comets in those first twenty years to fill every ocean on Earth and still have ice to spare. Some say they dumped a little _too_ much into that planet; the rainy season in the Agryre is ten months long."

Russo shrugged. "So I should I give credit to the Luminaries for that? Let em roam the asteroids from now till eternity. I don't care. A robot without a task is space garbage, nothing more." He lead Argent around the giant circular railing to the columns of glass elevators running along the side of the giant cylinder of the buildings innards. Both stepped inside, and with the push of a button the elevator walls became sound proof, closed to any form of radiation and electronic surveillance. The glass became opaque from the outside. "I wanted to ask," Russo said, "If perhaps you would be interested in taking out a further investment in the Third situation."

"What kind of investment? You think our partners abroad can't handle it?"

"Actually I have every confidence that they can. But when it all goes down and the contract is carried out, where do we go from there?"

Argent stared at him for a moment, "I don't follow you."

"If course you don't. You're a politician," Russo winked at him, "I'm talking about the technology. No one has ever seen anything like the Thirds before, and no one has ever built anything even _remotely_ similar. They have some truly marvelous technology, in fact every aspect of their construction far exceeds current machining capabilities, at least in the mainstream. You see, it's not just the Thirds that interest me, but the technology that goes into making them in the first place. It's literally _decades_ ahead of its time."

The elevator stopped, but the doors waited for his command to before opening.

Argent pondered for a moment, understanding Russo's position as a businessman. To him, the Thirds were nothing more than radically advanced machines, evolved descendents of the child-sized labor robot on its monument now ten stories below them. Russo was only interested in the potential of developing a new market product, or perhaps an entire line of products, based on the advanced systems of the Thirds themselves. _Free enterprise,_ he reminded himself, reciting what had for most Earthlings become a kind of religious mantra. _Our society turns on the Private Sector's ambitions..._ "That type of nanotechnology is illegal on Earth," Argent said, tactically forgetting to add, _at least it soon will be,_ "But some arrangements can be made."

"What kind of arrangements?"

"This is a free-trade society. If you want the technology, feel free to buy it from your foreign partners in this contract. Do all the research you like, we won't stop you."

Russo frowned, "The Martian partners know less about the technology than we do. They don't have the technical expertise to reverse engineer the stuff, and their hit guys never send back samples."

"That's too bad. I suppose your only chance is if you find one of them here before their hunters do, then you can capture it and rip it open yourself."

Russo tapped a button and the elevator doors opened. Russo lead the Foreign Minister a quarter of the way around the inner ring of the building to the large glass-framed room that was his office and sat in the chair behind his desk, "You know what I think, Jason?" Russo said, "It would save us a lot of time and trouble if we cut some kinda deal with the Thirds."

Argent's nostrils flared, "Deal?"

"Yeah, a deal. Say... we send them off to do whatever it is they're programmed to do, and in exchange they provide _us_ with the technology and construction details."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,"

"I beg your pardon, Jason," He said coolly, "But this whole scheme of yours has been harebrained from the start. It's a lot of risk to send contractors after a group of people or androids when you don't even know how many of them there are or where to find them all. Plus you have to bring in outside consultants like the Martian companies to make it work, and it's also very expensive. And you know, this is really starting to cut into my profit margins... I'm loosing a lot more in this contract than I stand to gain. It would be a lot better for business if we just banished the lot of the damn androids to Neptune or something... you know, send em the way of the Luminaries, then take over construction of the new ones so _you_ could have total control and then you wouldn't have to worry about—"

Argent took two large steps forward, raised his right arm, then buried it elbow deep into Russo's desk. A burst of splinters scattered into the air, and Argent leaned forward with a wild look in his eyes, "There's a lot more at stake here than profit margins and business! The Thirds represent the biggest threat to human kind in history and they cannot be allowed to exist! _Ever!_ Those are the terms of your cooperation with this government. If you don't accept those terms, I will burn Wayland-Mackenzie to the ground and you right along with it!" Having spoken his piece, he pulled his arm out of the smashed wooden desktop and turned to leave the room as calmly as if nothing had happened.

Russo watched him leave his office, and as he stepped into the hallway, opened a holographic window over his broken desk and watched him enter the elevator and begin the trip back to his car. Just a touch of a button and Argent would never leave that elevator alive, but Russo decided he was not quite ready to part with his plaything just yet.

He opened another holographic window next to the security camera screen and voice dialed just the right man for the occasion. "Spiner Androidery," a disembodied voice said over the speakers.

"Hey Goose, it's me." The image appeared on the screen: a dull looking man with handsome yet generic features and hollow green eyes that gave him away as a being of metal and plastic instead of flesh and blood. Even Russo had no idea where this man came from or how he came to exist on Earth, for that matter he couldn't even be sure that Goose wasn't actually a Third himself. The nature of their dealings, however, demanded a kind of trust Russo was not usually inclined to give to strangers, "He didn't like the idea."

"I hate being right," Goose grinned, "The Federal Government has always been a friend to big business, but in this case I think you'll find there's a kind of religious element involved. It's not about control, it's about pride."

"So it would seem." Russo brooded over it for a moment longer, then caved. "Alright, Goose, I'll, try anything once."

The android man smiled gleefully, "I knew you were a sensible man. Let's see if we can't work something out, hm?"

* * *

Detective Syllabus crossed over two lanes at once in order to catch the last exit from the freeway into the suburbs. At the end of the off ramp they crossed out of city limits, through a long tunnel that took them out into the unprotected elements of the planet beyond. He noted as always the massive wall that enclosed the entire city, fifty feet thick and a two hundred high. Armitage herself seemed more than a little intrigued by it, though undoubtedly she had seen it perhaps a dozen times before in a dozen other cities around the planet. "What's the matter?" He said, coyly, "You never seen a shield wall before?" 

Armitage shook her head, "Olmypius is a very wealthy country. Every city here has its own shield wall." The car passed through the tunnel. Armitage looked through her window and her eyes drifted skyward, scaling the side of the dome-shaped force field barrier that enclosed the thirty kilometer metropolis from dust storms and the bracing cold of the red planet. Almost as soon as the car emerged from the tunnel, the front and side windows began to fog up from the sudden cold. "I'm from Albion. Only two cities there have shield walls."

"I assume you never lived in either of them?" Syllabus turned on the heater.

"Old Gal isn't one of them. And after Albion declared independence from Dinneh, only the capitol can still afford to use it."

"Hm." Syllabus looked at the sky. It was approaching noon, and the sky was relatively free of clouds. Even with Mar's terraformed atmosphere, the sky he saw now was nothing like the daylight of his childhood. Even a cloudless day here, close to the equator, rarely got much brighter than mid-evening Earth, just a few hours from sunset. "You never did tell me," Syllabus said, "What the story is with all those implants."

"You never did guess right." Armitage said distantly, "Not that it's any of your business."

Syllabus grinned, "Then I'll take a guess. It has something to do with your father."

Armitage smiled, "Good guess!"

"When I figure out the rest, I'll tell you."

The car stopped at a red light, and Syllabus took this opportunity to check their position with his driving computer. A holographic overlay appeared on his windshield; they were still thirty blocks from the factory. "I just think it's funny," He said passively, "Replacing all those parts with cybernetic junk..."

"What's funny about that?" Armitage cocked an eyebrow.

"Think about it. How much of yourself can you replace with machines before _you_ become a machine?"

Armitage sighed, "Are you doubting whether I'm human or not?"

"No. I'm wondering if you ever doubted it yourself."

The light changed from red to green. Syllabus started the car and turned the corner in the direction they needed to go, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Armitage seemed to be having difficulty with the question. "I wouldn't say I doubt it," She said timidly, "Maybe I just don't care."

"Why wouldn't you care about something like that?" A new thought occurred to him, one that almost made him laugh, "You know, there are people who use those nanotech brain augmentations. Some people even install quantum effects processors to help them work with computers—of course, that's mainly a rich boy's hobby. Would you go for stuff like that?"

"What makes you think I haven't?" She shot him a sidelong glance, silently indicating she was growing annoyed with him, "Besides, you seem to find that pretty damn amusing for a guy with a fake arm and leg."

Syllabus was stung, but only slightly, "Robots are robots and humans are humans. The difference, I think, is that humans have souls and robots don't. But if you replace enough of your body with hunks of metal and plastic, what's left?"

"Who cares? The things that make you who you are aren't in your arms and legs, they're not in your bones or your hormones, and they're not in your glands or your brain cells."

"Then where are they?" Syllabus said, a little cynically, "If you don't even need a brain to be human, what's the importance of being human in the first place?"

"Humanity has nothing to do with the contents of your skull." Syllabus stopped at another red light, and Armitage leaned over and poked him in the chest, "It has everything to do with what's in here."

Syllabus paused for a long moment, looked into her eyes and examined her soul like a scientist probing a specimen. There was something mysterious about her, something he couldn't place or understand. There was a depth behind her eyes like layer upon layer, not just one reality but worlds within worlds within worlds.

It was like staring into an abyss of logic within madness.

He shuddered and decided not to look at her eyes anymore. "You're a real character, Armitage."

"I'll try to take that as a compliment."

Syllabus grunted, "I don't care what you take it as. And for what it's worth, I'm not much for any of this spiritual crap. Soul is just another word for mind."

"You just might be right." She leaned back in her seat and folded her arms, "And if you're right, then androids _do_ have souls... simple ones, sure, but definitely souls."

"You and I both know that's not true." The light changed again and Syllabus slammed the gas a little harder than he meant to, "Robots don't have souls. That's ridiculous."

"Once again," She said, "You just might be right."

* * *

"This is it," Raphael said, putting the files on his screen, "Oh man..." 

Jeremiah looked over his shoulder, "GM-30 assault rifle... charged plasma weapon using magnetic accelerator and a palladium fusion core." He whistled in amazement, "That's some impressive hardware."

"This thing is state of the art," Raphael said, "Each shot is like a tiny nuclear blast. It draws reactant mass from the power cell and feeds it into a force-chamber. Put enough power into it and you get a fusion reaction, and the charge coils direct the charged plasma through the muzzle." He clicked on a tab next to the specifications, playing a short CG video demonstrating the process for Jeremiah, "The Federation's been working long and hard on this project."

"Of course they have. The Navy's been mounting it on cruisers for a decade. The smallest version we've ever produced was the size of an artillery piece. I also heard something about scaled down model that was mounted on a tank, but..."

"According to all information, this gun is still on the drawing board. They shouldn't even have a working prototype yet."

Jeremiah frowned, "A radically advanced android unlike anything we've ever seen shows up with an advanced Earth weapon that doesn't exist, hunting down androids we didn't even know existed." He folded his arms and growled, "And a flock of pigs just flew overhead."

"Actually I'm not surprised. All the advanced weapons are made on Earth these days. This is probably some military experiment gone wrong."

"Goddamn Earthlings," Jeremiah spat on the floor and rubbed it out with his boot, "You know, this isn't the first time they've done something like this,"

"Hell no! Their entire military is a damn corporation. I bet this is some kind of product study like that thing three years ago with the -652 infiltrators."

Jeremiah's eyebrows raised, "The infiltrators?"

Raphael nodded. "You remember, right? Some MIC agents caught a pair of androids in Corsica City, spying on some government officials. They self-detonated before we could get to their memory banks but the parts were traced back to a Federation contractor."

Jeremiah nodded, finally remembering. "Armitage was on that case. I only heard about it on the news."

"Wayland-Mackenzie denied all involvement, of course. They said the two units had been stolen by terrorists."

"Wayland-Mackenzie is a bunch of damn liars." Jeremiah chuckled, "And they're also the Federation's largest defense contractor. They've been trying to corner the robot market for decades, but they just can't get the props for it."

Raphael took a few deep breaths, "That pisses me off."

"What does?"

"The Feds..." He tilted his chair back and folded his arms behind his head, "Just about everything on Earth is a business. Police, health care, education, transportation, even the military. It's like anything their government wants, they just hire some multi-national to do it for them."

Jeremiah grinned. "I love the way they brag about the fact that they haven't had a war over a hundred years,"

"Yeah, right, because instead of sending the military they go to 'Mercenaries R Us.' They don't call it a 'war' they call it a 'contract.'"

"It's scary," Jeremiah sighed, "Every day, Mars is becoming like that too."

"That's not true at all," Raphael growled, "We're not becoming _like_ them, they're taking us over."

"What?"

"Walk down the street any given Saturday and look around you. You'll see about a thousand brand names, logos, company names and TV stations, but only one in maybe six companies is owned by someone on Mars. Earth industry alone represents more than half of our economy right now."

"C'mon," Jeremiah chuckled, "That's some that stupid conspiracy theory, I hear it all the time..."

"Did you know every car in this department is manufactured by Toyohashi?"

Jeremiah's face turned blank, "Is it?"

Raphael nodded. "So are all the ambulances. They got a special contract with the government. Every police and emergency vehicle gets a 63 discount, along with a lifetime warranty."

"That's... a nice deal, actually."

"Do you know why they did it?" Raphael looked up with a glimmer in his eye, "For twenty years, every police department in the country had a contract with Faruk Motors for cars and response vehicles. Faruk _was_ the number one manufacturer of high performance vehicles on Mars. Toyohashi got this contract four years ago, and what do you think happened to Faruk?"

Jeremiah frowned, "Don't tell me they folded?"

"Not yet, but they're close. Toyohashi and Ford did the same thing in Syria, Dinneh, Daedelius, Meridian, Syrtis Arabia, even in Palestine. The only thing keeping Faruk afloat is their mobile armor contract with the military."

"Let me guess," Jeremiah grinned, knowing where this was going, "Toyohashi is planning to drive Faruk out of business."

"Nope," Raphael said, "They're planning to buy them out. This isn't the only time this has happened, they did the same thing with WDRZ Radio and a bunch of the TV stations. They bought out three major spaceship manufacturers, two home defense contractors, and just about every farm in the Arabian marshes. You getting the picture yet?"

Jeremiah shrugged, "So what are they, invading us?"

"Worse, they're _buying_ us!"

"So what can we do about it? Either way, we're loosing. This keeps up it's only a matter of time before the Federation companies own the entire planet, right?"

Raphael was silent for a long moment, his eyes darting back and forth as a rush of information crossed through his brain, "You know... if the Thirds are an indigenous Martian product..."

Jeremiah looked at him, sharing the same thought, "The Mr. X couldn't have come from Earth. It _has_ to be a Martian contractor."

Raphael was silent for another long moment, "Only three countries on this planet use a privatized military, the Bassilus, the Omanians, and the Tyhhreans."

"All of which are friendly with the Federation," Jeremiah said, "Then..."

Raphael raised a brow, then leaned forward again as his fingers flew over the keyboard, "The Federation is run mostly by companies. If these new androids are an indigenous Martian product, which one of them stands to loose the most from new competition?"

"With advanced units like these?" Jeremiah chuckled, "Shit, _all_ of them."

Raphael paused, suddenly realizing the same thing, "That's true... but which _Martian_ companies?"

Jeremiah started to formulate a few ideas, "We've searched all the records of terrorist groups... how about we check the financial records of all the Tyhhrean defense contractors, especially the ones that handle robotics?"

"There's not many of them in robotics. The Tyhhreans usually outsource to Earth companies."

"It's definitely _not_ an Earth company," Jeremiah leaned over his shoulder, brushing his fingers off the keyboard and running the search himself, "You see, even the Tyhhreans aren't going to give up an edge like that, not to offworlders. They may have gotten that plasma rifle from the Feds, but the android is home-grown. They'll keep _that_ technology for themselves."

Raphael nodded, "Well sure, but why the financial records?"

"Because there's no way they could get that plasma rifle unless..."

"Unless it was collateral for a contract." Raphael grinned, suddenly thinking in synch with his defacto partner in anti-crime, "So it's the Federation hiring a Martian contractor?"

"I wouldn't put it past them," The first search results came through from the MIC database, "The Feds are so dependent on the private sector that the companies have more power than the government. If they felt threatened by someone on Mars, then they could easily take out a contract with a competitor to deal with it the hard way."

"But you never know. It could be just as easily be the Federal Government pulling the strings, don't you think?"

"Maybe... but that still leaves the question, who exactly is their competition?"

Jeremiah scrolled down the list of Tyhhrean businesses, finally finding a few that fit the bill, "This looks like a good place to start..."

* * *

The warehouse building was quite a bit larger than the impression he got from the floor plan. Then again, the floor plan itself was probably to scale; everything inside the building was probably bigger than he imagined it as well. He looked skyward and saw the building towering over them like a fortress, the hazy pinkish-blue Martian sky reflecting off the windows on the top floor. 

Syllabus whistled in awe. "Why did they close it again?"

"The company had hard times. They ended up folding into an Earth corporation and moving all their factory work over there."

"Why am I not surprised?" Syllabus said sadly. He rubbed his shoulders reflexively, slightly underdressed for the forty degree chill of the suburbs. Armitage, somehow, didn't seem at all bothered by the cold, but from her body language she definitely seemed to have noticed it. "So how do we do this? Go up and knock?"

"It's supposed to be abandoned," Armitage said, "I'll go in through the roof."

"How do you plan to get up there?"

"I have my ways," She walked off from the car, disappearing around the corner of the building without so much as a backwards glance.

Syllabus slipped a tiny radio into his ear, then pulled back his sleeve and tapped the touch screen keypad of the portable computer on his right wrist. The radio cracked on Armitage's frequency, "Stay in touch now, you hear?"

"I hear," Her voice was unusually clear on his side of the radio, so clear that he started to wonder if the MIC transmitters were that much more advanced than the police equipment. Or perhaps, he thought, one of her brain augmentations had an audio channel.

He walked around to the side of the building and found the loading docks, with two massive loading doors for truck containers lining the wall. Each loading door had a smaller door next to it for human entrance, but the first thing he noticed here made his eyebrows twitch; one of the smaller doors had been knocked off his hinges, punched inwards from the outside as if a rhinoceros had rammed it. He stepped up to the landing and looked at the door more closely; in the center of the indent where the door had been smashed in, four elongated oval groves had left an impression in the shape of a man's fist. "Signs of forced entry," He said softly in his radio, "He's definitely been here."

"Well he's not here now. Satellite scan shows no sign of activity," Armitage said back, "Just the two of us."

Syllabus checked his wrist computer and confirmed it for himself, "10-4..., hey, didn't you say this place has been quiet for two days?"

"Yeah, all quiet since we traced that signal."

This made him slightly nervous. Either the warehouse had been a dummy location for the assassin, or he'd had the good sense to scram before the intelligence crowd could aim a satellite in his direction. Drawing his sidearm, Syllabus acquainted himself with a third, more sinister possibility, "Do your satellites ever have trouble tracking androids?"

"Not unless he's using some kind of trans-optic camouflage."

"What are the chances that he might have access to something like that?"

Armitage read between the lines. She drew her own sidearm from an invisible pocket in her jacket, at the same time chided, "Don't be such a chicken shit."

Inside the warehouse was total darkness. Faint Martian sunlight filtered in through a dozen skylights, giving just enough light in a few isolated spots to see the much of the main building was completely empty. He checked the floor plans again and checked on his own position; this was the largest room in the building, with three other smaller rooms adjacent to it, one after another in sequence, each divided by an office section three floors high. Each storage room, he observed, was large enough to house a small warship.

Even as he stepped into the building his world changed with but a well-focused thought; his prosthetic "eyes" changed modes, viewing the warehouse in enhanced night vision. The room was almost entirely empty, only dust and a few fragments of wood, and every few meters a small puddle of water from leaking pipes high above them. Again his eyes switched modes, sampling different spectra of light. He looked around again; no sign of blood or other bodily fluids. "I'm in the first warehouse. Nothing here."

"I'm in the office section across the third. There's a lot of file cabinets leftover from the last business here."

Syllabus paused, suddenly curious, "You're on the third floor?"

"Yes."

"How'd you get up there so fast?"

"I have my ways."

_Damn cyborgs..._ Syllabus switched back to night vision and looked to his right; in the side of the warehouse was a single loading door, and next to it a smaller door into the office section. He walked towards it slowly, all the while looking at the ground to make sure he didn't overlook something. Halfway there he sidestepped a puddle of dirty water, and just on the other side of it he saw what he was looking for, "Got a footprint." He said, kneeling down and switching to mutli-spectral again. The sensors in his eyes traced the outline of the footprint and recorded it to his wrist computer, which immediately analyzed and identified it, "Tyhhrean-issue army boots, size twelve. Thirty one and a half inch stride..." He looked along the ground towards the door and saw more prints off the same type, fading out as they lead towards the door, "He went into the office area in the first building."

"I'll meet you there." Armitage said on the radio, then paused again, "Never mind. I got a print here too in the second office on the carpet. Same pattern."

Syllabus followed the tracks to the office area and examined the door. It was unlocked. He opened it slowly, drawing his sidearm as he did, then stepped into the office area with his eyes shifted again to night vision. The office, as expected, was empty except for a coffee table and a folding chair.

"I got something..." Armitage said, "Whoa."

"What is it?"

"A kitchen... damn, the fridge is empty."

"Where are you?"

"Second office, second floor. If you're still on ground level, go up the stairs and take the catwalk over here."

Syllabus walked through the vacant dusty office, found the staircase in the next room, climbed up to the second floor office. He opened the glass door to the catwalk and stepped out onto it, but no sooner did he enter over the second warehouse did he stop and stare over the catwalk railing, gaping in surprise, "Holy shit! Armitage, are you close to a window?"

There was a brief pause as his companion moved through the second office, and across the warehouse Syllabus saw her appear in the an office window on the second floor across from him, staring out to the warehouse floor with a similar reaction, "Wow..."

There was no way to be sure what it used to be, but whatever it was, someone had taken a great deal of time and energy dismantling it. Fully assembled it must have been some amazingly complicated machine, roughly the size of a family car but made up of billions of tiny machine parts that at this moment were scattered across the warehouse floor in no particular pattern. Whoever had dismantled it had done so rather violently. "What does this look like to you?"

"I don't know, but I'm guessing it has something to do with the stuff in here."

"What stuff?"

Armitage waved at him through the window, "Come and see."

Syllabus crossed the catwalk to the second office area and met her at the door. She led him through the dark office and around the corner to another room, containing a small table, a stove, a counter top with a sink and a refrigerator. "There are cables running up the wall into this room," She said, pointing to a computer access port on the wall next to the refrigerator, "And over there," She pointed to the table, "There's a footprint on the table."

"Really?" Syllabus walked over to the table and saw for himself. It was the same shoeprint he had seen in the first warehouse across the puddle. His next instinct brought his eyes to the ceiling tiles above him, "I wonder..."

"Go ahead." Armitage said, "I already recorded the table top."

"Alright." Syllabus stepped on top of the table, side arm still in hand, and pushed gently on the ceiling tile.

"What's with the gun? There's no one here." Armitage said.

"You never know." He pushed the tile up a little more and poked his head into the opening, looking around in a circle. The space between floors was empty and completely dark. His eyes increased power to night vision automatically, and Syllabus switched one of his eyes into multi-spectral and scanned for body fluids or other evidence; as soon as he did, the crawlspace lit up like a Christmas tree. "Oh boy..."

"What?"

"Hold on a minute, there's something..." He pushed the tile up completely out of his way, turned around and faced the wall and found an object lying motionless in front of him. It took him all of six seconds to realize was staring at the disembodied head of a young woman, her mouth locked open in a silent scream that would never end, "Uh..."

"Found something?"

"Oh yeah." Syllabus tapped his wrist computer and recorded every last bit of information, analyzing it at the same time. In ten seconds he had his first analysis, "It's Ginger."

"Ginger?"

"Ginger Harrison from Bassilus." Syllabus looked all around him and recorded everything he could see in every scan mode possible, then reached up slowly and grabbed the head by the hair, ducking down from the ceiling space and set the head down on the table. "Have a look."

Armitage stared at it blank faced for a long moment, then timidly poked at the head, turning it on its side and examining the opening at the neck, "The wound as been fused... the superconductors here have been tapped."

"So she _is_ a robot, right?"

"She _was_," Armitage looked more closely, "Severe electrical trauma, feedback suggests system shorts... nothing left to salvage. I'm guessing Mr. X tried to hack into her memory bank, then burned out her brain when he had what he was looking for."

"He brought her head all the way here from Viking City? What the hell for?"

Armitage hesitated for a long moment, "The body was discovered just after Patrick was killed... if she was an android they'd have no way to tell the time of death."

Syllabus stared at the disembodied head with a pulse of anxiety, "If she was killed first, then Mr. X must have taken the head with him to Ithica, and then carried it to here as well."

Armitage nodded slowly, "If I had to guess, I'd say our killer was using Ginger's brain to update his hit list."

Syllabus flinched, "Why would Patrick's name be in Ginger's memory?"

"I don't know, but..." She glanced over her shoulder, a new thought occurring to her, "That machine outside... what do you think it could be? Some kind of computer unit?"

"It's a little big for a normal computer—probably one of those home-made supercomputers those hacker kids are always building. You think that had something to do with this?"

Armitage reached into the folds of her leather jacket, again finding an almost invisible pocket, picking out a pair of sunglasses.

Syllabus raised a brow. "You know it's pitch dark in here."

She put on the sunglasses, then picked up the head by the scalp and strode gracefully out of the room. "Call your forensics teams. We'll go over this entire building, inch by inch."

* * *

The phone on Chief Danford's desk rang in a low pulse, the dreaded ring tone he had assigned for a certain number he always preferred to avoid. He stared at the phone for a few minutes and considered whether or not to answer it, knowing it was futile either way, but also knowing that if he didn't the caller would only hang up and call back at least thirty more times until she had his attention. Sighing heavily, he picked up the phone and grumbled, "Danford," 

"You know what, Cliff?" The woman on the other line sounded, as usual, highly irritated, "I've decided something today."

Danford rubbed his temples, "Really, Sheryl? What did you decide?"

"I've decided that you're an asshole, and I can do better."

Danford sighed again, "Uh huh..."

"So I'm packing my suitcase, and I'm leaving. I'll see you at the divorce trial."

"Uh huh," Danford said again, looking at his watch, "Anything else?"

"Don't you have anything to say to me?" She said, still irritated but expectant.

"Not really, no."

"Nothing at all?"

Danford thought for a moment, then grunted. "I'm afraid not. Sorry but I'm just not in the mood to hear you whine today."

"Well if you're so sick of me, I'll just leave." She said, even angrier than ever.

"Suit yourself."

"You're not gonna try and stop me?"

"Nope." Danford kicked back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling.

"Why not?"

"Because if you were going to leave me you would have done it by now." His eyes fixed on something curious that he had never noticed before; a faint engraving on the holographic projector in the ceiling that read 'Ishikawa Imaging.' He remembered off the top of his head that Ishikawa was an Earth corporation, and in the next few moments he found his eyes wandering around every corner of his office.

"I'm serious this time though," Sheryl said, "I'm really leaving."

"No you're not," Danford stood up and looked at the tag under the cushion of his chair: it was made in Mexico. "You're only doing this because you're bored and want me to pay more attention to you."

Sheryl hesitated on the other line for almost half a minute, "I'm not bored! I got lots of things to do!"

Danford checked his pens; all of them were made in New York. And when he looked on the bottom leg of his desk he found that it too was made of wood imported from Montana, "Honey,"

"What?"

"Take off your shirt."

"Huh?" Sheryl sounded utterly confused, "What for?"

"I'm curious about something."

There was a pause on the other line for a moment, then she answered, "Okay, now what? You want my bra too?"

"Read the tag on your shirt. Where was it made?"

Sheryl paused for a moment, then answered, "China."

"Are all your clothes made in China?"

There was a brief pause, probably as Sheryl stripped off the last of her clothes and looked at the tags. Then, standing stark naked in the middle of the living room, said, "Yeah, probably everything I own. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, no reason."

"So um... I'm standing naked in the living room now. What else do you want me to do? Hmm?"

Danford heard a knock on his office door and looked up to see Raphael looking at him through the glass, "Listen, sweetie, I'll call you back later."

"Goddammit Cliff—!"

He hung up the phone and gestured for Raphael to enter his office. The young man stepped inside with a manila folder and a red pen, "I think I'm onto something, Chief."

"Spill it."

Raphael dropped the file on his desk and Danford sat back down in his chair and flipped through it. "One of the top Tyhhrean robot companies recently filed a seventy billion dollar contract with IBC. The contract was filed under client privilege, so we had to use an MIC hacking program to get the details."

"Seventy billion?" Danford looked through the file and squinted at the printout in confusion, "Autonomous Field Weapon Deployment? For only seventy billion dollars?"

Raphael nodded. "That's what I said too. Seventy billion is the kind of money you'd expect for mercenary contracts, like black-op or something like that. Field weapons testing usually runs into the hundreds of billions."

"What's the contract for, exactly?"

"It doesn't really say. It makes sixty two references to an "autonomous device," twenty two references to "additional devices," and seventeen references to an "equipment piece." Me and Jeremiah looked through the context and..."

"This is our man," Danford said, reading through it himself, "It talks about deploying an autonomous device for..." He looked for the term, "Field Operation 6104, 6109, 6111, 6112 and

6115. One of the parties is bound by the agreement to provide that equipment piece to modify the autonomous device."

Raphael nodded. "We checked a few similar references, but this is the closest match."

"Which company is this?" Danford turned over the papers, "I've never heard of them before."

"The Earth Company is a gang called Aegis Security. They're the Federation's seventh largest defense contractor, and the top manufacturer of advanced weapons. They're one of three companies working on down-scale plasma weapons for infantry, but there's a lot of rumors floating around that Aegis is just a front for some larger company. We don't know which one yet."

"And the Tyhhreans?"

"It's Titan Industries, a robotics company. And Wayland-Mackenzie is in on it too, but I'm not sure how."

"Wayland-Mackenzie?" That was a name Danford knew well, "That big military company?"

"Jack Russo cosigned one of the contracts. By the way, it's a little known fact they've been teasing their stockholders for the last couple years promising a major breakthrough in the robotics market."

"That's interesting..."

"I suppose it makes sense, I mean the Tyhhreans get almost all of their battleroids from Earth companies, but Titan Industries won the patent last year on the T-658, which is still more advanced than the Federation's top models."

Danford thought for a moment, "But the unit supporting Mr. X was a 640."

Raphael nodded. "I think they're probably covering their tracks. They're using an older model with an expired patent, straight out of some army surplus. That way they have deniability."

"That means Mr. X isn't a market product. They must not have a patent..."

"And I'll bet you anything it's because they're not the original designers. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd say they don't even know how to build him."

Danford put the file down and grinned, "I've got a hunch there's a lot more going on here than corporate terrorism. If the Thirds are somebody's bread and butter, the originator would have applied for a patent a long time ago. Why would he keep it a secret?"

"For that matter, why didn't Titan Industries beat him to it?"

Danford thought about it for a few moments, then began to follow his thoughts out loud, "If they don't have the original prototype..." He began speculatively, "If they win the rights from the IBC with a captured unit, and then an older unit should happen to pop up out of nowhere..."

"So they're trying to get rid of the original so they can claim the rights?"

Danford thought about this, then shook his head, "No way. I've got this funny feeling in my gut... like there's a lot more to it than that."

"Well what is it, then? You know how these corporations are, they'd knife their own mothers in the back just to keep their stocks from dropping."

"I don't know, Ralph... just keep digging. Get all the information you can about Titan Industries."

"Right away, sir." Raphael turned to leave the office, but as he did glanced back to see the Chief pacing around his office, poking at random objects inquisitively, "Something the matter?

"Oh nothing... just seems like I can't remember what planet I'm on anymore. Nothing in this office is made on Mars."

Raphael grinned, and turned to leave the office on the way back down to his desk in the station lobby.

* * *

Armitage was reclined almost horizontal in the passenger seat, her arms folded behind her head in a kind of catnap. Somehow, though, she still managed to give him directions as to where they were going, "Take the next exit," She said, not even bothering to look and see just what that exit was. 

Syllabus did as he was told, getting off the freeway at the next offramp.

"Turn right and go about two blocks, then turn left."

"Where are we going?"

"I need to check something out." Syllabus followed her directions, the right turn and then the left, finding himself suddenly driving the wrong way down a one-way street. "Turn left into the driveway," She said, "And park in front of the garage."

Syllabus obeyed again, and no sooner did he stop the car did his MIC companion fling the door open and walk briskly up to the front door of the little white house attached to the garage. She knocked twice on the door, and immediately the door opened.

A young boy stood in the doorway in a sleeveless white t-shirt and pajama pants; on seeing Armitage he immediately stepped forward and hugged her. _What's this all about?_ Syllabus thought, watching from the driver seat.

Armitage looked back towards the car and gestured for him to wait there, then disappeared inside and closed the door behind her. Syllabus turned off the engine and tapped a command on his wrist computer. A tiny audio-pickup on the hood of his channeled in on the house, feeding enhanced tracking of the most faint sound waves into his stereo speakers. As soon as it located them he heard the boy growl, "What'd I tell you about that? I hate damn pigs."

"He's with me, Julian," Armitage said, "Don't worry about him, he's harmless."

"Famous last words..."

"You afraid of a few pigs? You sissy." Armitage followed him through the living room to the kitchen.

"This is about Ginger, isn't it?" He said stiffly, "I hate to tell you, but I probably know less about it than you do."

"All we know so far is the coordinates. We just came from that warehouse."

Julian nodded. "Whoever this guy is, he knows his stuff. That signal was very convincing."

"What was in it?" Armitage followed him into the kitchen as he pulled his fridge open and gathered materials for a ham sandwich.

"The IP address was from Isaiah, but it was definitely Ginger's login. She said something about how the mystery assassin was hot on her trial and she needed someone to help her get off the planet. She said anyone who could help her would be appreciated." Julian assembled his sandwich with the precision and speed of a master chef, then tossed the sandwich, bread and all, into the toaster oven. "I might have answered her myself if you hadn't warned me ahead of time."

Armitage sighed. "Do you have any idea who _did_ respond?"

"Not a clue. As soon as I knew who it was I severed my connection to Isaiah. Delphi was running a trace program, but I guess he caught on because Isaiah's not broadcasting anymore."

"No shit. He trashed it completely. I guess you could repair it but that'll take time."

Julian watched the sandwich for a moment, then switched off the toaster, took it out and put it on a paper plate, "Ginger's only popular among the radicals. Somebody like Maria Patrick or even Loreto would get a better response."

"Yeah, except the word about Patrick already got out. And Loreto's already gone underground anyway... I suppose he had to start somewhere."

Julian cut the sandwich in half, took a bite of one half and handed the other to Armitage, "There's something else that bothers me though," He proceeded cautiously, very clearly due to the presence of the other detective outside the house, "How the hell did he get access to Isaiah in the first place? Even I don't know for sure where it is, but I know it is... or at least, it _was_ guarded by some of the local Jesuit thugs."

Armitage thought about this for a moment, then slowly took a bite of the ham sandwich, "How far did Delphi get with the trace?"

"Not far. The signal cut off right after Ginger wrapped up."

"Hmmm..." She took another bite of the sandwich and asked, "What was in the rest of the message? Just asking for help?"

"It said something about the assassin using a high tech rifle. I blocked her serial though, so if she said anything else I didn't hear it."

Armitage nodded, and in another moment stepped forward and kissed him on the forehead, "Keep an ear to the ground for me, Julian."

"I always do."

Armitage walked towards the front door, but before she opened it Julian added, "Oh, one more thing, I got really weird message on voice mail this morning."

"From who?"

"Someone named Goose. Said he was a fan of Dad's handiwork and wanted to discuss some business proposal."

Armitage hesitated for a long moment, "No details?"

"Nothing. I assume he wanted some work done, maybe repairs or an upgrade or something. He left his number if you want to call him back."

"Forget it," She said, "Do you want me to assign you some protection? We're working with the police you know."

"I told you, I hate goddamn pigs. I can take care of myself."

Armitage nodded, and opened the front door again.

Syllabus switched off the audio pickup and started the engine again. Armitage stepped back into the car and straightened up her seat. "Detective, you did a thorough scan of the outside of that warehouse, right?"

"Of course."

"And you didn't notice anything? No sign of struggle, combat, shell casings, blood spatters...?"

"Except for that busted door, the scene was untouched."

"Hm..." She stared at her feet for half a minute, the gears in her head chewing on the data one piece at a time, "Well, c'mon," She said at last, "Let's get this head back to the station."

Syllabus nodded, backed the car out of the driveway and started back towards the freeway. "So what was that all about? He a friend of yours?"

"Who? Julian?"

Syllabus nodded.

"He's my kid brother." She said, "He likes to keep track of android activity. That busted machine in the warehouse is an old A.I. hub, androids call it Isaiah. I figured Mr. X must have been using it to try to contact the local Thirds, and he used Ginger's brain to disguise the signal, draw them out of hiding."

"Clever bastard," Syllabus grunted, "Your brother monitors robot traffic?"

"He's a programmer, it's a hobby."

"He looks too young to be a programmer... what is he, fourteen?"

"Thirteen." Armitage said. "And he's the best programmer this side of the Argyre."

At the mention of the subject, Syllabus chuckled, "Come to think of it, you look too young to be an agent yourself."

Armitage raised a brow. "How old do you think I am?"

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, "I'd guess about fifteen... maybe younger."

Armitage laughed. "It's all part of the deception, Detective."

"How old are you really?"

"I'll tell you when you guess right."

"Heh." Syllabus put the car back on the freeway, speeding towards the police station in downtown Saint Lowell. "You know I'll just pull your name from Public Records."

"I'm not listed. MIC wipes the database."

Syllabus frowned, "Raphael can hack the MIC mainframe. Cyber warfare is his speciality."

"Makes no difference. The only files he can get are the doctored ones."

Syllabus frowned even more. "Then the only real way for me to guess would be to get into your pants."

"Which would make you a felon," She said stiffly, "And I would arrest you."

Syllabus turned slowly, stared at her in surprise, "Then you _are_ underage."

She smiled mischievously.

"How in the hell does a fifteen year old get a commission as an MIC field agent?"

"I'll tell you when you guess right." Armitage said, "And I'm not fifteen."

Syllabus leered at her, "Then how old are you?"

"I'll tell you when you—"

"Aw, to hell with it!"

The conversation ended there.


	4. Chapter 3

_Nothing can heal your wound; your injury is fatal. Everyone who hears the news about you claps his hands at your fall, for who has not felt your endless cruelty?_ -- Nahum 3:19

* * *

**Chapter 3**

"How'd it go on your end?" Syllabus said, already able to guess from the sullen expression on Raphael's face.

"Got a few leads," Jeremiah said, "We think Mr. X is working for a Tyhhrean defense contractor. Ralph thinks it's the usual corporate espionage, but the Chief thinks there's something else going on."

"Did you get anything on the previous owner of that warehouse?" Armitage said.

Raphael shrugged. "Bankrupt. No use tracking them down, they've already been disbanded."

"Oh, well that's just lovely..."

"However," Jeremiah interrupted, "You may be interested to know that the current owner of the building is a guy named Jacques Dan Claude. There's nothing in the records, no background and no information, just his name and nationality."

"What _is_ his nationality?" Armitage asked.

Raphael smirked slightly, "Tyhhrean."

"That's a coincidence." Syllabus said,

"Isn't it?" Raphael turned his attention back to the keyboard, pulling up the his newly discovered files on his screen for the others to see, "I've been going through the IBC records, but I can't find a paper trail. We'll try again later with the real-estate index."

"Good man," Syllabus slapped him on the shoulder, "Well, we brought you back a nice juicy morsel for the evidence lab." He gestured toward Armitage, carrying the disembodied android head in a plastic bag, "You wanna get started on the data?"

"Sure thing. Jerry?"

"I'll be right there." Jeremiah leaned over Raphael's shoulder and whispered, "Show me that website later, okay."

"Yeah, man, no problem."

"Thanks." Jeremiah followed Armitage through the back office towards the forensics lab.

Syllabus walked up behind Raphael, and put his hand on his shoulder, "Keep this between us," He said softly, "Punch up the data on Armitage' background."

Raphael flinched at the question, "Armitage? What for?"

"Just humor me."

"Okay," Raphael entered the search parameters, "What are we looking for?"

"Family information," He said, "Any known relatives living or deceased, place of birth, age, nationality..."

Raphael entered the data, and almost immediately the information came up on screen from the MIC profile database, "Here's the official listing... Naomi Armitage, born August 6, 2179 in... Ross, what's today's date?"

"August Sixth." Syllabus hung his head. "She _did_ say the records were doctored."

"You're kidding? Then she _wasn't_ born seven hours ago?" Raphael sighed, then his fingers typed out a digital concert on the keyboard, "This is kids stuff you know... a simple encryption to keep the public from getting to the records. The data's hidden in the text but it's selectively miscoded."

"Can you break it?"

"Easily," Raphael said. Then he paused, and looked at Syllabus tiredly, "Wait... this is stupid. You know the _real_ file is gonna be fake too."

"I know that, but it'll have just enough truth in it so it'll _look_ authentic. It's designed to throw off the counter intelligence crowd."

"Whatever..." Raphael's fingers flew across the keyboard again, and suddenly the profile opened in a new window next to the old, this time with the "correct" information displayed. "Born 2163 in old Gal City, Southern Dinneh."

"So she's _sixteen_," Syllabus muttered, "Unless _that's_ fake too."

Raphael paused, thought for a moment, "I thought Gal was in Albion?"

"They separated from Dinneh back in 65." Syllabus remembered.

"Oh yeah..." Raphael picked up his place in the file, "You're right... they immigrated to Olympius in 65 to escape from the war. Her father was Dr. Richard Asakura from Ithica University..." Raphael whistled in amazement, "Asakura... _the_ Asakura?!"

"Who's that?"

"This guy was the chief designer of every T-6 model from 19 to 35. Says here he died of a muscle disease on November 1, 2174 at age..." Raphael did a double take, "That's really weird."

"What?"

"Well it says she enrolled in Ithica University using a Gardner Scholarship."

"So?"

"Gardner Scholarships are for the kids of living faculty. In order for her to get a Gardner, she would have to have enrolled before Asakura died."

"So?" Syllabus said again.

Raphael stared at him, annoyed, "Well to get it, she would have to have enrolled when she was _ten_."

Syllabus groaned. "So it's another fake."

"That or Armitage is some kind of freak-genius." Raphael's eyes sparkled, "In which case, I'll ask her to marry me!"

Syllabus laughed at this remark, though from what he had seen from Armitage it was probably far from the case. "Does it say anything about siblings or anything?"

"Siblings?"

"Yeah... I mean, it may still be fake but MIC might list them for a reason... some counterintelligence ploy or something."

"Selena Lito age 17, Vincent Apollo age 13 and Jacques Dan—" Raphael froze at the name on the screen, staring in disbelief. "Well what do you know!"

"Jacques Dan Claude," Syllabus said, reading the file, "Why would that be there?"

The phone on Raphael's desk started ringing, and Raphael picked it up on the second ring, "DeSoto speaking," He listened for a moment, then groaned in anxiety.

"What's wrong?" Syllabus said.

Raphael shook his head and stood up from his desk, starting towards the elevator. "We've got another Chucky Complex."

* * *

The squad car rounded the corner at top speed, barely keeping control on its bearings but just managing to speed off down the street again. The android was in sight up ahead, racing down the street as fast as his legs could carry him. Detective Jefferson's car screeched around the corner just behind the squad car; from the speed they were going and the rate they were closing on the android, he guessed that the Maverick was doing at least forty miles per hour. "Officer Micas, see if you can get ahead of him," He said on the radio, "Slow him down and I can get a shot."

"What do you think I've been _trying_ to do?!" The officer said in the squad car just ahead of him. Again he tried the move, sifting slightly over to the left and then gunning his engine to pull ahead of the android. This time, of course, he didn't bother trying to side swipe it, but as before the android changed directions, jumped over the squad car, then jumped again onto the rooftop of a house, barely slowing down in the entire process.

Jefferson could see the Maverick android was still on the move, leaping from rooftop to rooftop and somehow managing to maintain the same speed there as he did on the ground. "Shit, this is impossible." He growled.

The sky above him crackled. A small airship passed overhead, blazing the air around it with the barrel-shaped field generators. The pilot swung a spotlight down onto the rooftops of the houses, then moved forward again to follow the fleeing Maverick as he bounded from house to house, then back down to a major street to continue on in a straightaway.

Jefferson's dashboard beeped, and he tapped a button on his steering wheel. Detective Syllabus's voice filled the car, "Where's it headed, Kenny?"

"We've got a ship following him. You see it?"

"Where?" Syllabus and Raphael both leaned out the window of the car and looked up. The airship suddenly passed directly over his car, and in a split second so did the android—bouncing off the roof of his car and sprinting off down the street. Syllabus drew his gun and fired two shots, but all in vain; it changed direction in the middle of the street, raced across someone's front lawn and over the fence to the rear of the house. "It's impossible to follow him! We can't even slow him down!"

"Ross," Jefferson stopped his car on the side of the street and pulled up a map of the neighborhood on his front windshield, "Oh shit!"

"What?"

"Look where he's headed! We're about five blocks from the Maglev Station! If he gets on that train..."

"Damn!" Syllabus's foot smashed the accelerator. The car squealed on its bearings for a moment, then surged forward, slamming them both into their seats.

Raphael tapped a command into the computer unit on Syllabus's dashboard and called, "Dispatch, this is Syllabus and DeSoto; request clearance for air operations."

"Negative, DeSoto, you're over a residential area. Remain grounded."

Syllabus growled, and added his own protest, "Dispatch, we can't even setup a roadblock! We can't follow him unless we get airborne."

"You heard me the first time, Detective," The woman said, and promptly closed the channel.

"Shit." Syllabus turned the corner, all the while keeping his eyes cast skyward towards the airship as it circled the sky almost a block ahead of them. "He's getting close to that station." He said. "What type is it, again?"

"A T-655," Raphael said, loading his gun and taking off the safety, "Modified for messenger service. That's probably why it's so fast."

"I'm sick of these robots going maverick all the time. We never had this problem with the old models."

"Maybe they're getting _too_ smart," Raphael said.

Syllabus grunted in agreement, then gasped as the airship suddenly spun around 180 degrees and started to reverse back in the opposite direction, back towards them now. He slammed on his brakes and tried to turn around, but then the airship changed directions again—as did the Maverick it was following.

The android jumped down from the roof of an apartment building nearby, sprinted across the lawn and once again spring-boarded off the roof of Syllabus's car. He caught hold of a street light and climbed to the top, and from there jumped to the roof of a small house across the lawn. His weight was too much for the roof and he crashed through, but didn't remain there for more than a few seconds before smashing his way out through the back wall of the house again.

Syllabus grit his teeth. "Can we tag it with an EMP?"

Raphael frowned, "Not in this neighborhood. We'd kill power to half the block."

He slammed the gas down again, and the car raced forward and curled around a corner to cut off the Maverick from his flight to the maglev station. It crossed the street directly in front of them and ran down an alley way; Syllabus slammed on his brakes and slowed to a stop, then spun the car and took off down the alley in pursuit. "This is damn imposs—" Something passed him on his left side and shot far ahead of the car, hot on the trail of the fleeing android. He couldn't see it clearly, but as it passed he could just register the after image of a fluttering leather jacket and comet's trail of blonde hair, "No way!" He slowed down slightly, and watched to see what would come next.

The android saw her coming up from behind. He swerved out of the alley and crashed through a wooden fence into the back yard of a larger than average house. Halfway across the yard he dove forward and pointed himself like a lawn dart. His momentum carried him on an almost flat ark; he burst through one of the kitchen windows and rolled to his feet, ran through the house and smashed out again through the front door (startling a young woman on the front porch reading a romance novel). Seemingly home free for the moment he ran into the street and back in the direction of his escape route.

Unfortunately his peripheral vision didn't see her until it was too late.

She spear-tackled him from a blindside at forty miles per hour. The impact knocked him completely out of the street, over the curb and sidewalk, careening and skidding across two lawns until both of them rolled into the side panel of a pickup truck.

Both of them jumped back to their feet, but while the Maverick tried to run again, Armitage merely kicked his legs out from under him, then planted one of her boots on his chest, pinning him down as he now stared down the barrel of an MIC handgun. "You jerk!" She growled, "You know I just got this jacket dry-cleaned?"

The android's face was a mask of indifference. His eyes, however, were not. "Three blind mice... see how they run!" He said desperately, "My spider's name is Jerry!"

"Good to know," She lifted her foot off his chest and rolled him onto his belly. He tried to get up again and make another dash for freedom, but the barrel of her gun slammed his face into the dirt and held it there. She reached into one of her pockets, came up with a thin neural cable. She plugged one end into a port on the back of her neck, the other end to the base of the android's neck. In the next few seconds she accessed his memory, tunneled past his firewalls, and finally reached his main program lines. "So why were you running?" She said as a prompt.

"My mommy told me happy is blue."

The words were nonsense, of course, but patched into his brain Armitage could see the memories he was trying to express. There was something about a conversation between his Manager and one of the staffing directors; apparently the company was suffering budget cuts and was planning to get rid of him. The Manager had suggested that they either sell him or trade him in to a dealer for a small deposit, but the staffing director they would get more money if they scrapped him and sold his parts. Two minutes later, the young woman and three others were standing over him with a laser torch and a crow bar. A jumble of images and sensations followed, which ended with a final image of the young staffing director writhing on the floor with both of her arms broken. The android had started running that very minute.

"What's wrong with your speech centers?" She said.

He pointed to the side of his head. A policeman's bullet had sliced through his skull at an odd angle, both entrance and exit punctures very clean.

"I see." She took the cable and coiled it up quickly, tucked it back into her pocket as Detective Syllabus and DeSoto walked up behind her with guns drawn. "I got him," She said over her shoulder. "One of you must have hit him. There's damage to his speech centers and..."

Syllabus walked past her without a word, stood over the android and stared at it for a moment. It wasn't moving. "Did you kill it?"

Armitage shook her head, "I just shut off his motor functions so he can't run away. I'd like to—"

Syllabus aimed his gun at the ground, and fired a single shot.

The android's head exploded like a vase, scattered its contents across the yard in a shower of microchips and metal plates. He lowered his aim slightly and fired again, this time into the base of its neck, separating whatever was left of its head from the remainder of its body. "Robots," Syllabus said, safing his gun and returning it to its holster, "I'm sick of this shit. Every other week..."

"I told you, Ross, they're getting smarter." Raphael said, "C'mon, let's leave the cleanup to the shirts." The two of them walked back to Syllabus's car.

"Yeah, yeah." Syllabus looked at the sky. The sun was on the horizon and fading slowly. Light pink haze of Martian twilight would fade more and more every minute, and before long even with the shield wall, the temperature would drop to well below fifty. "Let's call it a day," Syllabus opened the driver's side door.

Armitage appeared next to him and slammed it again. "Why did you do that?"

Syllabus looked at her in confusion. Her glasses were on, darker than ever. He could see his reflection in the lenses and for some reason it bothered him very much. "Do what?"

"I told you, I disabled him. You didn't have to _kill_ him."

"It's standard procedure, Armitage," Raphael said, "When an android suffers a major malfunction, the D.A. says to bring it in and dismantle it. But since we don't really have an effective way to subdue an android for capture, procedure is to destroy them on site, and catalogue the parts for disposal later."

Armitage' eyebrow twitched, "That's procedure?"

"Of course," Syllabus said. "MIC does the same thing, doesn't it?"

"The hell we do." Armitage took a step back, opened one of the rear doors and sat down inside. Raphael did the same, and Syllabus took the driver's seat and started the engine.

"Well then, what _should_ we have done?" Syllabus said, "You know, the rule exists for system integrity. Most of these androids get all buggy because of viruses or defective software. Some of them are contagious. The last time we brought in a unit as advanced as this one, two others nearby went Maverick at the same time."

"For starters," Armitage hissed, "It's an act of brazen stupidity to destroy the thing before you know what caused it to go haywire. He could have been sabotaged, or he might have been running and emergency protocol. He might even be running for a _reason_."

Syllabus sighed, "Basic investigation, is that it?"

Armitage nodded.

"Unfortunately it's not that simple. If somebody like the Marionettes or Islamic Jihad was tinkering with the android, the thing would blow sky-high as soon as we got it into the car. We've even had that happen a few times."

Raphael grunted in agreement, "These puppet bombers get more creative every day."

"It's always a hazard," Syllabus put the car in gear and started off down the street again. "But I guess the Thirds are the logical exception to the rule."

"Not for long," Raphael pointed out, "Once this investigation wraps it, it'll be business as usual."

"True." Syllabus turned the corner toward the station, but them remembered his extra passenger, "Where are you parked, Armitage?"

"You didn't have to do that." She muttered again.

"Armitage, where are you parked?" He repeated.

"I ran here," She said. All emotion was gone from her voice. "Let's just get back to the case."

Raphael turned around slowly, "You ran seven miles in fifteen minutes?"

"Ten minutes," She said, "It comes with the job."

"Nothing personal, Armitage," Syllabus glanced back, "But I'm startin to wonder if maybe robots are less annoying than cyborgs."

"Cyborgs by far," Armitage said, then grinned, "You're living proof of that."

Raphael laughed, "So how long have you twobeen married, again?"

* * *

It was just the end of lunch hour when a visitor in a black trench coat entered the Thompson Center, walked casually to the security checkpoint manned by the three sentry androids, Wayland-Mackenzie prototypes more advanced than any market product. He recognized them as soon as he saw them, and could hardly hide his contempt as the first of them dumbly guided him in the right direction. One of the androids must have sensed his indignation, for as he approached the sensor gate, muttered something inaudible under his breath.

The visitor stopped short of the gate and stared at the sentry android, fixing him with an icy gaze. "What do they call you?" He said coldly.

The android straightened up and put on an air of authority, "Miguel."

"What's your model number, Miguel?"

"None of your damn business," the android cocked his head to one side, "What's it to you?"

The visitor shrugged. "Just wondering if you're the latest asshole model they're putting out or some ten-year-old trash."

The sentry restrained something a reflexive urge to pound the daylights out of this visitor; instead he glowered at him, and in the most professional tone he could manage, responded, "State of the art, Son."

"Prove it."

One of the other sentries added from a corner, "Your mother seemed pretty convinced."

The visitor smiled. "I think I could get used to this..."

"Goose," Jack Russo stepped out of the elevator across the open lobby and waved him over as if calling to a long lost friend, "Over here, man! You're early."

Russo's visitor stepped through the sensor gate, and the moment he crossed the threshold more than a dozen alarms sounded on the control panel next to it. All three of the sentries reached for their guns, but just a touch of a button on Russo's wrist computer and they immediately stood down.

Minutes later Jack Russo was turning a small memory card in his fingers, staring at it with a sense of awe. It amazed him now that this little sliver of metal and plastic the size of a cigarette lighter stored data and information that in itself was worth billions, perhaps trillions of dollars. But the potential profits this data could bring him were simply incalculable. "You're sure it's all here?" Russo said, "Every bit of it?"

Goose smiled. "All of the hardware engineering, machining data, all the original blueprints and design concepts, plus the fundamental programming scripts for the advanced ghost system. Everything you need to mass produce the Thirds."

The expression on his face was like a child on Christmas morning opening the greatest present in the known universe. If Goose had been sitting three feet closer to the desk, Russo would have reached over and kissed him. "I suspect this is more than worth the price I'm paying for it."

"About that..." Goose leaned forward and placed another memory card on the desk. Russo picked this one up and looked at it curiously, "The data on the first card is separated into fifteen parts, and each part has its own fractal encryption. Any attempt to decipher it will result in the release of tapeworm program that will erase all data on the card. In order to decrypt this data, you will need to use the program on the second memory card."

Russo looked at the second card, then up at Goose with newfound respect. "Fifteen parts, eh? I take it there's no coincidence that you charged me 150 billion for this?"

"Your reputation is well earned, Russo." Goose stood up and held out his hand.

Russo reached into his desk drawer, fished around for a moment, then handed him a small electronic key. "You're a man of unusual tastes, Goose, but you're also reasonable. I suppose that's why you're making me do this in installments."

He grinned. "Where do we collect the payment?"

"A safe deposit box on Lake Street and Home. They'll be handling your first four payments. The next four will be delivered to a location of your choice... I assume you'll be delivering the other decryptions by hand?"

"No. In the future, I'll leave them in the safe after I collect the payment. I highly doubt that we will ever meet in person again after this."

"I understand."

Goose turned around gracefully and started to leave; he seemed to walk with a limp, but Russo couldn't tell if it was because of a damaged leg or a fake gesture to appear more human. "Goose," He said suddenly, "If you don't mind me asking, why _did_ you insist on receiving payment in gold bouillon? Federation credits are just as good, even have a higher interest rate."

"Let's just say it's a value judgment," Goose said with a hint of shrewdness, "That one man's trash is another man's treasure."

By the time Goose had left the Thompson Center and made his way back to the pickup point, the van had been slapped with a parking ticket and the driver was asleep behind the wheel. Goose tapped on the windshield and the man woke up, then tapped a button and unlocked the doors. Goose walked around to the passenger seat and climbed inside while his companion, a clinically bored Douglass Royko, started the engine and purged the spherical bearings. "One hundred and fifty billion..." He said, somewhat awestruck, "I know that's a good start, but is it really enough?"

"It's more than enough. The only raw material we risk having a shortage of is solid gold. We're getting plenty of that from Russo, plus tungsten and phosphorus from Macrosoft. With a little patience, billion turns into trillion, next thing you know we've got a GNP that rivals the Bassilus. It's amazing what you can get by exploiting the greedy."

Royko pulled the van sideways out of the parking space, then forward in traffic and started towards the Congress expressway, "When is MAG making the pickup?"

"Soon, I hope. You've heard what's happening on Mars haven't you?"

Royko nodded sadly. "Ambassador Marriott told me what to expect. I was actually hoping he was wrong."

"I've never known Marriott to be wrong," Goose said, "But we need to be cautious. Nobody else knows you're here, let alone your secret. And only Russo even knows I exist... I suspect that'll change when it's time to move shop."

"Yeah," Royko stopped at a red light; he reached down and turned on the van's radio. "Knock it off, Goose, I'm getting depressed."

"Me too. Sorry about that."

The light turned green and Ryko turned the corner and started on the expressway.

* * *

"... diplomatic relations appear to be at a standstill, with so far neither side willing to make a compromise to its position. A spokesman for the Olympian foreign ministry said that negotiations are now completely suspended." The screen cut away to an on-site interview with an short Greek woman, visibly frustrated.

"Every time we push for a compromise, they up the ante and increase their demands. We ask them to withdraw some of their troops, they start demanding new trade options. We ask them for a cease fire, they say, only on the condition that we _give_ them half of Palestine. It's absolutely ludicrous!"

The anchor woman cut in again, "Meanwhile, the Olympian Third and Seventh Air Fleet are now holding position over the Argyre and Agean Seas, respectively, together with coalition warships from Albion, Dinneh, Mokoto, Toroshima, Saria, Meridian, Babylon, and Syria. Aonia Terra has declared neutrality, but they are believed to maintain passive support of the Bassilus in all..."

"It's the end of the world," Syllabus groaned, still half asleep but slowly rousing again under the spray of a cold shower. The talking heads of the news network in the next room faded into an incomprehensible buzz as, for now, he no longer cared what was happening in the world. When he was sure the life had fully returned to him he turned the other knob and the water began to warm up for him. He thought to turn off the radio to stave off depression, but even he couldn't deny the whispers on the air that very soon the entire planet would be plunged into global war. And even as that thought crossed his mind, he felt a shudder in the walls and the floor beneath his feet and the distinct moaning of a scalar field generator somewhere up above the city. Reaching for his bath towel he turned the shower, plodded across the bathroom and stuck his head out of one of the windows.

Three warships were passing directly over Saint Lowell, the distinctive triangular hulls of the Olympian Navy glimmering in the morning sunlight. Olympian airships always reminded him of giant arrowheads, all except the new battleships, latest addition to the fleet, which to him looked more like flying metal whales. These newer ships, or so he was told, were fully submersible. The thought of it made him laugh, remembering the motto of the Olympia Navy, _From the ocean depths to the edge of space._ Perhaps they were taking it a little too far?

He was barely dressed when the phone rang on the desk next to his bed. He picked it up without reading the I.D., clipped the handset to his eat, and shoved his feet into shoes. "Syllabus, here. Please be someone nice."

"No luck detective," Armitage said on the other end, "Get down to the station right away. There's been another shooting."

"Dan Claude again?" He shoved his other foot into his other shoe, then reached across the bed for his shirt. "How about I meet you at the scene?"

"Ralph and Jerry are already on their way over, but I need your assistance _here_ before anything else."

Syllabus chuckled, "Why, Armitage, you almost make it sound like you missed me!"

"I _did_ miss you." She said plainly, "You have very broad shoulders and a nice body. You're sexy, charming, and fun to look at."

He was speechless for a few seconds, unsure of just how to respond to that, until finally the moment passed and he realized, "Sarcasm does not impress me, Armitage."

"What if I were to wiggle my ears and sing the National Anthem backwards?"

"Now _that_ would impress me."

"Then get your ass over here and I'll give it a try." Armitage ended the call and a low beep rang through Syllabus's headset. He finished dressing, gathered his guns and his equipment, dropped a couple of frost minnows in Shelly's tank, then left his apartment as he always did.

Almost immediately outside the front door of his building, Syllabus stopped and looked around in curiosity, counted off five squad cars and a firetruck along with a police van, several suspects already inside it. He didn't even have to look up and see the burnt-out shells of the two androids stapled to a large iron cross hanging from the fire escape of the building across from his own. The flames of the execution had spread to the building itself and six tenants had been evacuated, and though the fires had gone out the department had not yet managed to remove the cross and the two machines adorning it like some hellish decoration.

Syllabus loitered here for some time, not really understanding why, looking around the scene and asking other officers for the particulars of the incident. Apparently one of the androids had been babysitting its owners' seven year old daughter, and outside of their own apartment building the pair was mugged at gunpoint. The android managed to dispatch the mugger, but a passing group of demonstrators, seeing the incident, misinterpreted what had happened and swung into action with their usual zeal. But the presence of the second android was as yet unexplained, according to police and fire department.

The little girl the android had been guarding was sitting on the steps of the apartment building now, sobbing quietly with a teddy bear under her arm. She was dressed in pink pajamas, obviously at the insistence of her parents that she try to get some sleep, and obviously had not been able to do so since the incident occurred. Syllabus sat down next to her, greeted her with a smile. "Hello there, little miss," He said in a warm, fatherly tone, "I'm sure you're sick of detectives asking you questions by now, but I just ask you one thing?"

The little girl looked up in anticipation.

"Where did that other robot come from?"

She shrugged. "I not know," She said with a heavy middle eastern accent, "She come to James sometime, sometime when we have walking. She say name Kimberly."

"You've seen it before?"

The girl nodded. "She friend of James."

"You see them together often?"

"Yes. I think she girlfriend of James."

Syllabus looked up at the two android corpses. Normally he would have laughed at the idea, but now he just shivered.

Detective Jefferson appeared in front of the steps now, noted Syllabus and the girl, and offered a strange look that could have been directed at either of them, "Detective," He said, "The fire department's blocking traffic in front of the garage. You're going in early, so let's trade cars."

Syllabus nodded, and left the girl on the steps to her lonesome again. Jefferson slapped a set of keys in his hand and pointed him in the right direction with a nod. Syllabus started towards his car, but as he walked asked him, "I was reading a report the other day that violent crime in Saint Lowell has dropped by four hundred percent in the last five years."

"I read that one too." Jefferson said, "The funny thing is, in that same period, android-related crimes have gone up by six hundred percent. And it's advancing on a curve, most of that increase is in the last two years."

Syllabus frowned, "I guess people don't waste time killing each other, they just send a robot to do it for them."

"Or go out and kill a robot." Jefferson looked up at the two burnt shells hanging from the fire escape, "The owners of both of these androids said that the two of them knew each other. Whenever they passed they'd stop and talk for a little while, or sometimes communicate on the internet. The girl's owner said that she actually jumped out of the window of a moving car and ran three blocks to get here... probably alerted by wireless that the other one was in trouble." He turned back to Syllabus with a worried expression, "You know, if the distance had been a little longer, if the police had snagged her first, that little kid over there would have..."

"She says," Syllabus dropped into Jefferson's driver seat, "That Kimberly was James' girlfriend."

"What do you think?"

Syllabus was silent for a long moment before answering, "These robots aren't subject to logical fallacies. It didn't come here to save that other android. It knew it didn't have a chance in hell, but it came anyway..." He closed the door and started the engine, but looked again at the two burnt shells. He shuddered again, "She came here to die with him."

Jefferson stared at him suspiciously, "Do you need some time off, detective?"

"Probably." Syllabus put the car into gear and pulled away from the scene of the massacre.

* * *

Even Jeremiah was impressed by the crime scene here. The entire eastern wall of the house had been chopped to pieces, along with the squad car in the driveway and several cars parked along the curb. The pattern of the heavier damage was identical to the previous attacks, the power of a plasma rifle against old thermo-plastic and sheet-metal houses. On the other hand there was at least as much evidence that someone had fought back; the inside of the house was littered with shell casings from at least two different weapons.

Raphael stepped through the smoldering remains of the front door, sidestepped evidence technicians and crime scene investigators pouring over every inch of the building with snoopers and large sensor equipment. He stopped in the center of the living room and knelt down beside one of the bodies, lying in the midst of a gigantic red stain on the carpet where the plasma rifle had cut him down. There were three giant holes in his chest, each large enough to contain a softball, and through each hole Raphael could make out the gleaming metal of the skeleton underneath.

Jeremiah knelt down next to him, wondering just what it was he found so fascinating. "You've never seen a dead android before, have you?"

Raphael shook his head. "Not in person, no." He looked more closely at the three large holes in the chest. The android's ribcage was very different from a human's; it wasn't a true "cage" at all, but a set of overlapping metal plates that parted below the sternum almost exactly like a human ribcage. The metal of the chestcage was half an inch thick, and in the places where the plasma bolt had torn through the hole in the armor was half the diameter of the hole in the "flesh" that surrounded it. Beneath the chest plate was a thick but firm red sponge-like material, interlaced with a wonderfully elaborate lattice of metal conduits and circuits, packed into the chassis like a giant three-dimensional computer chip. Even in the openings where the bolts had torn through the body, no two components were separated by more than a millimeter. All of it seemed to be made of either plastic or metal, with tiny round globules the size of corn kernels that looked like spherical circuit boards lying exposed here and there, connected between circuit plates large and small. "Looks nothing like the T-6. Those are all metal and clunky like walking computers or something."

Jeremiah nodded. "The Thirds make excellent use of nanotechnology. Everything in them is smaller, so of course the primary systems are packed more closely together in the upper torso."

Raphael looked around the carpet at the grey stain around the body. Inside the chest cavity, as well as closer to the body on the carpet, the stain was more of a blood red than grey, and yet every moment seemed to be fading towards a kind of liquid-metal texture. "Is that toxic, you think?"

"The forensics guy tested it. It's called an Electric Ionesco median. On contact with the atmosphere it oxidizes and turns grey. I have no idea what it's for."

"Ionesco..." Raphael plied the channels of his memory, "That's a liquid metal capacitor used in trilithium batteries." He took a laser pointer out of his pocket, circling an area where the bolts had torn through the chest plate, "It's configured at the molecular level to store huge amounts of electrical charge. But it won't release that charge unless it comes into contact with a certain catalytic alloy."

Jeremiah shrugged, "I don't get it."

"Well, if you're standing in a pool of water and drop a live wire, what happens? You get electrocuted. But with this solution you could drop ten wires into a pool of it and you'd never feel the charge unless you had the right catalyst somewhere on your skin."

"That's interesting."

Raphael thought for a moment, then tapped a command into the wrist computer and pulled from his coat a small "snooper" headset and placed it on his right ear. Once it was in place, the headset unfolded itself, extending a glass eyepiece over his right eye and opening an array of tiny sensors to enhance his own vision. He switched the snooper into L-mode, linking the sensors directly to his wrist computer as they ran detailed scans the wounds in every spectrum of radiation, displaying all their findings on the screen over his right eye as they did.

Jeremiah watched over his shoulder, "Why would they be using this kinda stuff for blood, do you think?"

"Off the top of my head, I bet it's similar to the way your blood acts as a medium for the sugar and proteins and oxygen and stuff your cells use for fuel."

"What do you mean? Like electronic plasma?"

"Something like that. See these here," He pointed to the tiny bean-sized globules woven into the mesh, "look to me like nanotech integrated circuits, and they probably have some kind of charge pin coated with the catalytic alloy. So the solution acts like a kind of liquid power source for the entire system, regulates internal temperature, and keeps the tension off the fibers."

"That's pretty neat," Jeremiah said, "Whoever designed this thing is either a lunatic or a genius."

"Or both." Raphael reached into his pocket, slipped his hand into rubber glove, and poked his finger into one of the wounds, "What exactly powers these things? The plasma bolts might have damaged it."

It was an interesting thought, and Jeremiah took out his own gloves and peeled back part of the skin around the centermost wound, "Right there," He said, "There's a palladium fuel cell the size of your fist."

Raphael worked his fingers into the wound, pulling away the mesh of fibers and tiny machines to expose the six-chambered fuel cell to his vision. He found it there after a moment, and then stared at it in surprise, "It looks intact," He said, and with his free hand pulled out a snooper and switched it on. The first sensor data was overlaid in front of his normal vision; the rest of the body was cold, but the fuel cell was warmed to just over 120°F. "It's still operational."

Jeremiah nodded, and tapped his own wrist computer with his free hand to open a signal to the police station, "Armitage, this is Jerry. It looks like we might finally have lucky break. I'm bringing a body to the lab, I think we might be able to repair it, but first we'll need to order out to a repair shop for some equipment."

"Good news, Jerry. Make sure you check the whole scene before you bring it_ in_."

"10-4." Jerry glanced towards the nearest investigator, "As soon as you're done with this room, wrap this thing up in plastic and put it on a back board."

"You got it," The officer said, sweeping over the last corners of the room with his own snooper.

Jeremiah moved off from here, through the house to the kitchen and into the back yard where the second body lay in pieces. This one was female, a young woman seemingly in her teens, lying naked in the grass with her upper body smashed to bits. There was no sign of her head or face.

Raphael stood over the pile of circuits and scattered materials, and gently put his foot on the largest piece of her body that was left. "He shot her down as she running," He said, glancing towards the door, "Turned her over," He pointed to a spot on the grass that was stained with her blood, "Pinned her down like this," He looked under his foot and found his shoe resting on her stomach, just below her ribs. He pointed his finger like a gun and said, "Bang bang bang... He wanted to make sure she was finished."

"Why is she naked?" Jeremiah said, "You don't suppose the assassin...?"

"He didn't have time. The only reason he left the other one alive is because the police showed up before he could finish his work." At the mention of the subject, Jeremiah glanced over his shoulder and called to the nearest officer, "Excuse me, who was the first on the scene here?"

The office called through the house for the two who had shown up first, and both of them walked around the side of the house and greeted Jeremiah with a nod, "Officer John Kyris," He said,

"Officer Sandra McFly," His partner said, bringing up the rear, "We were the first on the scene."

"Did you get a good look at him?" Raphael said.

Kyris shook his head. "He opened fire as soon as he saw us. That damn ray gun blew my squad car to bits."

"Did you hit him?"

"I did," McFly said, pulling her gun from the holster, "I fired six rounds from outside, one of them must have hit because he stopped firing."

Raphael checked the chamber, "Are these flechetté rounds standard issue?"

"No, special order. The dispatcher said something about a laser gun or something, so I figured..."

"That was good thinking," Jeremiah said, "You might have damaged him. If he goes looking for a place to make repairs we should be able to track him down."

"That's good... that's great!" McFly said. "I hope you find the son of a bitch."

Jeremiah raised a brow. "Taking this a little personally, aren't you? It's just a squad car."

"No, it's..." She looked past him at the remains of the body on the back lawn, "I grew up in this neighborhood. Susie and Frank were good friends of mine."

"Yeah, mine too." Kyris said, "I'd love to get another crack at that asshole, to tell the truth."

Raphael and Jeremiah exchanged a long glance, then both started at Kyris, "How long have you known them?"

"A couple years," Kyris said, "They moved here when I was in high school. That was about ten years ago."

McFly nodded, "Yeah, that's right. They had a little girl too."

"Little girl?" Raphael glanced over his shoulder at the body on the glass, "Was she Susie's kid or adopted?"

"She was Susie's kid from another marriage." McFly took a short trip down memory lane, "She and Frank didn't get married till just a few years ago. They had an outdoor wedding and..."

Jeremiah suddenly became very nervous, "They didn't find the kid in the house did they?"

McFly thought for a moment, then an expression of absolute gloom darkened her face, "Shit... I never thought of that!"

"Thought of what?"

"Today's a school day. School doesn't get out for another hour or two so she should still be there..."

Jeremiah took off running back towards their car, and Raphael immediately put in a call to the SLPD station. Syllabus picked up after just a single ring, "What's up, Ralph?"

"Ross, get a squad together right now! Mr. X is going after another target!"

"Already? How do you know that?"

"I'll explain later! I'll get you the address in just a minute..." He heard Jeremiah shout the address from the front of the house, "2160 North Wells. You got that?"

Syllabus punched in the address in his wrist computer, then started at it wide-eyed, "Ralph, that's a middle school."

"I know." Raphael ran off towards his car, gesturing for the two officers to follow him, "You guys want some payback, come with me!"

* * *

The secretary of the school office yawned tiredly and glanced at the clock again. Time had slowed to a crawl, and though several hours had passed since she last looked at the clock, the clock had only advanced another fifteen minutes. "Gods, why are you punishing me?" She grumbled idly, "Can we just skip to the end? It's already Friday..."

She heard a tiny beep on her computer as the front doors of the building opened. She glanced up from her desk as a tall man in a long trench coat pushed open the second set of doors and walked up in front of her desk. "Can I help you, sir?" She said in as friendly a tone as she could manage.

The man seemed to swagger up to the desk and plant his hands on the desktop, filling the universe with an arrogant vibe, "If you could, you wouldn't have asked such a stupid question."

She squinted at him suspiciously, "What?"

"Look, I'm a busy man, lady." He reached into his trench coat and pulled out a single photograph, "Have you seen this kid around?"

She looked at the photograph and recognized her face immediately, "Can't say that I have. Why?"

"Cute little thing isn't she?" The man said, looking at the photo himself, "You wouldn't know it from looking, but this little cunt is a nanotech cyborg."

The secretary shrugged. "That's not unusual. A lot of parents use nanotech prosthesis to correct birth defects."

"Oh, I'm sure they do. But this aint the usual prosthesis, not by a long shot. It's in her genetics, you see." He tucked the photo away, folded his arms jovially, "She's a disgusting little freak of nature, barely human at all. I've come all this way to this shitty looking school to find out what her brain is made of."

The secretary carefully reached under her desk, tapped the silent alarm button under the computer terminal, "How do you plan to do that?"

He stood straight up and laughed out loud. "Oh! I'm _so_ glad you asked that! How _do_ I plan to do that?" In a movement took quick for her to follow, he reached again into his trench coat and drew another object, long and rectangular, easily identifiable as some kind of firearm. He pointed the gun directly at her head and chuckled, "I suppose I'll have to rip the damn thing out of her skull, huh?"

Time seemed to move extra slow as the secretary counted off the final second of her life. The time it took for his finger to depress the trigger seemed to take a geological age, and the entire world held its breath as her life flashed before her eyes.

The plasma rifle discharged a single pulse. It fired just over her head and crossed the entire office, burning through the glass door of the security office, hitting the base of the security officer's phone an instant before his finger could press the last digit of the police's emergency line. Next he turned the plasma rifle to the secretary's computer terminal and fired a short burst into the keyboard, demolishing a section of the desk itself. "Now if you don't mind..." He put his hand on the side of her terminal, and suddenly the monitor—the only part of the terminal left undamaged—lit up with a listing of students and their class schedules. The computer filtered through the records as if possessed until it came to the file on the same student he was looking for. "Art class?! Haha, I _love_ finger-painting!" He took his hand off the terminal, then with another short burst from the plasma rifle put the machine out of its misery. "Now... who do I have a kill to get a hall pass?"

* * *

Armitage tapped a button on the side of the gun, and a cylinder popped out to the side of it like an old-style revolver. She fed four bullets into the revolver, then slapped it back into place. Syllabus glanced out of the corner of his eye and whistled, impressed. "Nice gun. That standard issue."

She nodded. "It's called a hot loader. Standard automatic long slide with a laser-guided revolving chamber underneath."

"Why the second barrel?" He said, turning the corner onto the last street before the school parking lot.

"For specialty rounds. It has better recoil..." They slowed to a stop in front of the school, Armitage threw open the door even before Syllabus stopped the car. Something rang in the back of her head in a moment of horrible realization, "The silent alarm's been tripped!"

"What does that mean?" Syllabus said, jumping out of the car behind her.

"He must already be inside. All the classrooms lock down automatically." The front entrance was at the end of the parking lot, but Armitage ran off straight for the side doors at the opposite wing of the building, "Check the school's database. I need to know what class she's in."

Syllabus ran behind her, typing in a query search and using a police override for security, "Room 215," He said.

Armitage ran up to the side door and found it electronically locked. She placed her palm on the lock and muttered something inaudible; immediately the door unlocked, and a tiny red light flashed on the security desk in the main office. The secretary, made sure not to move, not to tip off the gunman until he was finally out of sight, then immediately rushed to the security desk and tapped the console there, "Front desk,"

Armitage's voice came over the speaker, clear as a bell, "This is Special Agent Naomi Armitage with SLPD. Is he inside?"

"He just went down the hall! He's got some kind of laser blaster or something... I uh... I gave him a hall pass..."

Armitage groaned, sprinting up the stairs with Syllabus trying to keep pace. "What's wrong?" He said, following right behind her as she left the staircase on the second floor.

"He's just a little bit ahead of us." Both drew their guns as they ran, and the two of them turned left at the end of the hall and rounded the corner at once...

Armitage shoved him to the side on a reflex, a string of plasma bolts cut the air just an inch from his head as he scrambled back around the corner. She stopped in the hallway and fired twice, then ducked into the doorway of a nearby classroom as the gunman returned fire. The plasma bolts hit the row of lockers next to the doorway, tearing completely through them and punching out again in the side of the wood where Armitage was taking cover. One bolt clipped the shoulder of her jacket, and she yelped in pain.

The gunfire from the plasma rifle stopped for a moment, and the hallway filled with the sadistic laughter of the man behind it, "Saint Lowell's finest, huh?" He said snickering, "Whose side are you on anyway? You don't know what these goddamn machines are up to?!" He fired another burst into the lockers, tearing away another section of the doorway where Armitage ducked for cover. She huddled closer to the door as the plasma rifle's fire came ever closer to a hit; from the classroom next to her she could hear the students screaming.

Syllabus popped up around the corner, fired off six shots in rapid succession. Four of them exploded against his chest, knocking him back a step with each impact, but he recovered immediately, raised his rifle and fired back laughing, "Hey, no violence in school asshole!" He fired another long burst from the plasma rifle, this time tearing through the wall where Syllabus was taking cover. One shot drilled through the wall and sliced through his prosthetic leg just below the knee, severing it in a shower of sparks. He lost his balance and fell into the open hallway, right into the sights of the plasma rifle.

Armitage sprang out from around the corner and fired seven rounds one after another, all seven of them scoring hits. Again he staggered from the exploding rounds, but before he could regain his balance and shoot back, Armitage aimed carefully and fired a single round from the hot loader.

The bullet rode the laser beam all the way to its target, drilled into the gunman's wrist and exploded just under the skin. The plasma rifle fell to the ground, and with the hand that was holding it, leaving the gunman standing perplexed in the hallway, staring at the suddenly useless stump at the end of his forearm. His eyebrow started to twitch. "This is..." He started chuckling cynically, "Kinky, isn't it? Think you're too tight to accommodate?"

Armitage pulled a new magazine from her jacket, popped the old one out of the grip and reloaded the next one in a single quick action. The gunman turned and ran back down the hall as she emptied another magazine at his back. He staggered heavily as three more shots exploded against his back, then ducked into doorway kicked in the door to one of the classrooms.

Armitage heard the students inside screaming as he ran through the classroom, then the sound of breaking glass from inside. She ran after him and rushed into the classroom, then across the room to the broken windows and looked down to the parking lot outside.

The gunman stood below, looking up at her with a sadistic grin, waving his damaged arm in the air tauntingly, "Lube yourself up, baby! I'm coming for you!" He shouted, then turned and sprinted across the parking lot at a speed only possible for an android.

Armitage turned back to the classroom, seeing all of the children huddled into a corner on the side of the room farthest from the door. They seemed visibly terrified of her; glancing at her own appearance, she decided she couldn't blame them. Trading the side-arm for her badge in one of the various trick-pockets in her jacket, she put them all at ease with just one moment, "The police are coming. All of you stay put, okay?"

The teacher nodded, and a few of the students offered thankful murmurs.

She walked back out of the classroom and down the wall to where Syllabus was sitting against the wall, poking at his severed leg and examining the damage. "I just got this damn thing recalibrated." He groaned, "My warranty only covers accidental damage."

Armitage examined his leg, poking a finger into to the damaged circuits, "How about that!"

"What?"

"This is from the Tin-Man series, isn't it?"

Syllabus nodded. "My doctor recommended it. Tin-Man was state of the art back them."

"It still is." Armitage smiled playfully. "My father invented these you know."

"Invented what? Tin-Man?"

She nodded proudly. "The neural-net you're interfaced with was his first invention. He won an Asimov Prize for nanotechnology."

Syllabus smiled, "I don't suppose your old man passed on any of that genius to his little girl?"

"Of course he did. But I won't do it for free."

"Oh, c'mon!"

"Hey, I won't charge you for it. I'll just want a favor in return."

Syllabus groaned, then reluctantly agreed. "Fine, you got a deal."

Armitage patted him on the shoulder, then stood up again, "Wait right here." She walked over to where the plasma rifle had dropped, picked it up and opened the fingers still wrapped around the grip. "We finally have a sample," She said, walking back over to Syllabus and dropping the rifle—hand and all—on his lap. At this point she turned around and looked at the doorway she had only moments ago used as cover from the plasma rifle and read the room number over the door, "We sure cut it close this time."

"No kidding." Syllabus said.

The sound of police sirens echoed from outside, and Armitage walked over to the door and knocked three times on the door, "SLPD, Buffalo Bill," She said, remembering the codeword used by police officers to alert teachers that the danger had passed.

After a long moment, the door unlocked from the inside and the teacher opened it slowly. The first she saw was Armitage's badge from MIC, but on seeing Armitage herself suddenly became very confused. "You're... a cop?"

"Undercover." She said defensively, "I need to borrow one of your students."

The teacher tapped the light switch and the room became visible. Armitage scanned the faces of the students huddled in the corner and finally found the one she was looking for, "Jennifer Cooper," She gestured for the girl to approach. She responded, but only after a long hesitation, and stood off a good distance from her, "Are you Jennifer?"

She nodded shyly, "Am I in trouble?"

Armitage shook her head. "I need you to come with me right away."

Jennifer hesitated again, "I wanna call my mom first."

Armitage looked up at the teacher, communicating the situation with just a glance. The teacher's face turned pale, but with a pulse of willpower she managed to keep her emotions somewhat under control. "Jennifer, you can tall your mother after you talk to the police, okay?"

"But she's gonna come and pick me up. She doesn't know about..."

"I'll tell her," The teacher said, "Don't worry, okay? I'll tell her the whole story and I'll tell her where you are."

"But... well, okay."

Armitage took Jennifer's hand and led her gently out of the classroom and into the hallway.

Raphael and Jeremiah were just now coming up the stairs, followed by two uniformed police officers, all with guns drawn. At the sight of Armitage they visibly relaxed. "Did you get him?"

Armitage shook her head. "He's tougher than he looks. I'm gonna need more shells for my hot loader."

Raphael nodded. "Talk to the SWAT guys." He glanced over at Syllabus, still sitting on the floor looking at his severed leg piteously, "What's _your_ story?"

"I'm just counting my lucky stars he hit the fake one."

Jeremiah chuckled, "You probably have Naomi to thank for that."

"Probably," He looked up at Armitage and raised a brow, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Why?"

His eyes focused on the wound on her shoulder, and the apparently un-noticed trail of blood from the doorway to where she now stood. Everyone looked at her now, eyes drifting to the burned-off slice of her jacket and the scorched flesh underneath. "That looks bad," Raphael said, leaning in for a closer look.

Armitage jerked away. "It's just a scratch. I'll take care of it."

"You sure? It's bleeding really..."

Jeremiah stepped up next to her and looked at the wound more closely. This time she didn't jerk away, "Not bad at all. I got stuff in my car."

Armitage handed Jennifer over to Raphael, "Take her back to the station. Get her something to eat, it'll be awhile."

"Alright." Raphael knelt down to Jennifer and looked her in the eye for a few moments, "You look scared."

She nodded.

"Have you ever been in a police car before?"

She shook her head.

"Tell you what, I'll let you work the sirens and the lights, okay?"

She smiled slightly. "Really?"

"Of course. You're my special lady today."

She discarded hesitation and nodded fondly. "Okay."


	5. Chapter 4

_Good people walk on regardless of what happens to them.  
Good people do not babble on about their desires.  
Whether touched by happiness or by sorrow,  
the wise never appear elated or depressed._  
--Dhammapada 6

**

* * *

**

**Chapter 4**

Armitage lifted the chest plate off the damaged torso and took a full look at the components beneath for the first time. He had been very lucky; the plasma bolt had missed his fuel cell by a few inches, but it had severed the main power lines from the cell to the power relays that supplied the rest of his body. Armitage scraped away some of the spongy insulation around the severed leads and soldered a new connection between the three main power feeds and the android's spine. "How much did these parts cost you?" She said to Jeremiah without looking up.

"Eighty thousand just for the conduits. Those capacitors were five thousand each."

Armitage sighed, "I only used ten of the capacitors. Can you get a refund?"

"Nope."

"Damn," Armitage reached into the bag and pulled out another length of superconducting conduit, heated it with a laser torch and bent it into its proper shape by hand; the zig-zag pattern that would bypass just the right components and make contact with the fuel cell. "Did you get me that candy bar?"

"I got two, one with nuts, one without. You owe me a hundred and sixty."

"Screw it, let government pay for it."

"Using government funds to by a candybar..."

"Sure. Why not?" She took four more lengths of conduit and did the same, then soldered them into place with the main lines.

The android's body started to twitch. One by one she secured the power lines into place, and a little at a time he returned to consciousness. His eyes opened fully even as Armitage secured the last conduit into place, then raised his head and looked around in curiosity. He tried to speak, but no sound came out. "Your voice box is offline," Armitage said, looking up and making eye contact for only a moment, "And your right leg is a little screwed up."

He looked at her piteously for a moment, and then dropped his head back on the work bench.

"Just a minute, I'm almost there..." She soldered two severed conduits back together, then charged one of the transistors in his upper chest.

The android let out a long low electronic moan, then raised his head again and spoke in his own voice, scratchy and distorted from lack of electrical power. "You're not cops, obviously." Hr grimaced at the sound of his own voice; they could have gotten better sound quality from a rusty cassette player.

Armitage nodded. "We're with MIC."

"Oh, joy." He dropped his head on the bench again. "I know this is a silly question, but why am I not dead?"

"You're a material witness." Jeremiah said.

"I'm also an unregistered android. If you were following procedure I'd be in a scrap heap by now."

Armitage shrugged. "Obviously, we're not following procedure." She connected one more lead, and the android's voice box slowly began to return to normal. "How's that?"

"Better." He cleared his throat and then spoke a little louder, "Where's Susan?"

Jeremiah hesitated to answer for a long moment. "Your wife is... um..."

He read between the lines, closing his eyes in a flash of pain, "Oh no..."

"I'm sorry," Jeremiah tried to be both sensitive to the situation and expedient, "The assassin is still on the loose. That's why we need your help."

"What's your name?" Armitage said, connecting the last of the severed leads for the moment and moving his chest plate back into position.

"Cooper," He said distantly, as his voice was more or less back to what it should be, but burdened with sadness, "Frank Cooper."

Armitage re-sealed the chest plate into place, then laid his synthetic skin and tissues back into place on top of if. Jeremiah replaced her next to the work bench with a multi-caster and ran the electric ark along the cut on the center of his chest, fusing the materials back together. "What's the last thing you remember, Frank?"

"Susan was up stairs taking a bath. I just happened to look out the window and see this nutcase with some crazy rifle in his hand. He started shooting at us, so I called to Susan and told her to run for it. I went to the closet and got the gun and started shooting back."

"Twelve gauge, right?"

Frank nodded. "I swear I hit the guy, but it didn't even slow him down. That ray gun of his went right through the wall and hit me and..." Jeremiah finished closing the incision, and Frank sat up slowly, painfully, "Then I was here." He took a few breaths to swallow the pain—physical and otherwise—before a new thought burst in his head, "Is my daughter okay? Where is she?"

"She's fine. Just talking with the chief."

"Did something happen?"

Again, Jeremiah hesitated to answer, "We caught up with the guy before he could get to her... and I mean _just_ before. He's a tough son of a bitch too."

Frank tried to stand, but found in frustration that his right leg was completely unresponsive, "As long as he has that damn ray gun..."

"You mean this?" Armitage reached across the work bench and placed the rifle in his lap, "Assuming he's off looking for a replacement weapon, we might be able to track him down. In order to find him first, we need to know a few things first."

Frank nodded slowly, "You want a copy of my recent memory data?"

Armitage nodded. "If you don't mind, of course."

* * *

Raphael pointed to the corner of the screen and focused in on it once again. "There's another one," He said, "Same composition, same machining pattern." 

Syllabus nodded in agreement. That made four parts so far, all of them traced back to the Yamaguchi Factory in Libertyville, the very same factory in which his leg was manufactured. At this point he glanced down at his own left leg, tapping it on the ground reflexively. Armitage had repaired the damage in less than thirty minutes where it would have taken his dealer at least a day and a half to finish the job. "That factory makes parts for fifty different companies. You think you can narrow it down a little?"

"Can't be that specific. Yamaguchi is a wholesaler. They don't make androids, just parts. They also serve about three dozen other factories within a ten-mile radius, so any one of them could have built this android."

Syllabus looked at the diagram from Susan Cooper's remains. He frowned at the implications, "This doesn't look like a mass production job."

Raphael nodded in agreement, "Sure doesn't, at least not in the truest sense of the word. If I had to guess I'd say she was custom-built to specific parameters. That fits the pattern we've seen with the Thirds so far."

Syllabus reached over his shoulder and tapped the keyboard, switching back to Susan Cooper's personal information and medical records. "Okay, we know most of these records are forgeries," He said, wandering down a logical alley, "But the one thing we know _isn't_ a forgery is her daughter's birth certificate."

"Right," Raphael said, "Medical and hospital records, insurance files, even the social security number checks out."

"So we have to assume that at some point, Susan Cooper was human."

Raphael nodded again, "I guess so. But why the switch?"

"Somebody, uh... someone must have..."

"In the records, Susan Cooper has no outstanding warrants, parking tickets, no mob connections, no terrorist connections... why replace her with an android after her daughter's born?"

"I don't know! Goddammit, nothing about this thing makes any sense!"

Raphael looked up from his desk to the interview room at the other end of the lobby. Jennifer Cooper was inside, sitting across from Chief Danford, scribbling something on a sheet of paper to answer his questions. "Who was she married to when her daughter was born?"

Syllabus reached over his shoulder again and scrolled through the records, "She was never married. The file says she was working as a prostitute in Old Gal City when she got pregnant."

Raphael rubbed his scalp in frustration. "Why would anyone replace her with a robot?"

"Gal City..." Something was forming as a hunch as in the back of his mind; faint and distant, and highly improbable. It didn't lead him anywhere in particular, just the notation of a possible pattern, "Where is Maria Patrick from originally?"

"Right here in Saint Lowell," Raphael said immediately.

"But where was she born?"

It took him only fifteen seconds to input the data into the police information network, and fifteen nanoseconds for the computers to put the files on his screen. "She lived in Old Gal until she was two."

"And Ginger Harrison?"

Raphael put in another search, and blinked, "Libertyville."

Syllabus suspected as much, "And Jacques Dan Claude is from Old Gal too."

"So are Armitage and her brother and they're both human enough."

"You think?" Syllabus looked towards the interview room thoughtfully, "This puzzle's starting to look very different from the picture on the box."

* * *

Chief Danford looked at the diagram even as it formed underneath the girl's—apparently—expert hand. She left no detail unfinished, no marking no matter how small was overlooked. Even the tiniest strokes of her pencil finished off the very last details, and marked to precise scale of measurement just how the desks in her classroom were arranged and which windows were open at the time of the incident. She put her pencil down in completion and pushed the paper over to Danford, in all its glory. "Let me get this straight," He said, looking over the diagram, "You memorized the entire floor plan of your school?" 

Jennifer nodded absently.

"Just by looking at it?"

Jennifer nodded again.

"How?"

She shrugged indifferently, as if she had never really given the question much thought before. "Can I see my mom now?"

"Not yet, okay? There's some problems we have to take care of."

"Like what?" Jennifer eyed him suspiciously, "Look Mr. Danford, I'm only in Seventh grade but I'm not dumb. If my Mom's hurt or something you really need to tell me."

Danford sighed. "That's part of it."

"I knew it." Jennifer frowned. "The guy who wants to kill me went after my parents too, right?"

"What guy?" Danford raised a brow, "I never mentioned anything about a guy being after you."

"He was shooting at that detective lady," She said, "I saw it through the window."

"What makes you think he's after _you_?"

"Because I'm—" She caught herself mid-sentence, then shyly stared at the table. "N-No reason."

Danford stood up to the gentle knocking on the door, opened it poked his head into the hallway. He returned just a moment later and gestured for Jennifer to stand up, "There's someone here to see you," He said, "C'mon."

Jennifer walked towards the door as Danford opened it for her, then seeing her visitor in the hallway accelerated to a sprint and leapt into her father's waiting arms.

"Thank god you're alright!" He said, catching her out of mid-air, all the while balancing himself on his own good leg, "God honey, I was worried!"

Jennifer said nothing, only clung to him in a sudden emotional outburst that left her sobbing silently into his shirt.

Armitage walked past them, whispered in Danford's ear, "He's gonna walk with a limp for a little while but for the most part he's healthy."

"Healthy?" Danford grinned. "That's a funny way of putting it."

"I copied his memory data," Armitage handed him a folder with a few sheets and printouts, "Here's our man."

Danford looked at the photo in the folder, a high resolution image of the shooter's face. He had a wild look in his eyes as if he had just parachuted off the top of a skyscraper. His messy blonde hair had a streak of brown in it, and a Z-shaped scar on his left cheek. "Put out an APB."

"You've got it." She looked back at the hopeful family reunion, not wanting to interrupt but having little other choice, "Mr. Cooper," She said gently, "We need your help catching this guy. In order for us to do that, we need to know where you came from."

Frank looked up slowly, communicating without words that he had no intention of disclosing that information, "I'll help you find the bastard, that's all. As far as anything else is concerned, it's none of your business."

"You're operating illegally, Mr. Cooper," Danford said coldly, "Technically you shouldn't even be walking again."

"And you know good and damn well you can't catch this guy without my help. All you know is that he's going after Thirds, but you don't know why, and you don't know where to find us. If you get too nosey, you don't get any more of my help."

Armitage stepped towards him and stared directly into his eyes, "Let's make one thing clear, Mr. Cooper: the same guy who's after you has already killed more than a dozen androids of the same class."

"Yeah, well—"

"We don't know where he comes from, who he's working for, or how he's picking his targets. For that matter there could be more than one of him. If you're not working with us, we cut you loose and toss you back into the wild."

Frank opened his mouth to say something, but before he could make a sound, a brief flash of right light crossed Armitage's pupils. The exchange lasted only half a second, but in just that time the two of them reached a very important understanding. "Ginger Harrison sent out a signal asking for help. She said someone was after her and said anyone who could help her needed to meet her at this warehouse over in Farnsville. If it was Ginger we would have helped without question, but just be on the safe side we all agreed to send Justin to the warehouse to check it out."

"Justin?"

"Justin Donald... he's a cab driver, lives close to the harbor."

Armitage glanced at chief Danford, who immediately punched in the data in his wrist computer, "Did Justin ever get back to you?"

Frank shook his head. "When he didn't come back we assumed the worst. Susan wanted to pack up and skip town but I told her we had nothing to worry about. I mean... well Justin doesn't know where everyone lives. If they captured him they couldn't use his brain to track us down."

"He didn't need to," Armitage said, "Once he had your names all he had to do was hack into the public records."

"I guess we hadn't thought of that," Frank sighed, and shook his head with a sense of loss, "What about the others? Have you sent out a warning or something?"

"We put out a police bulletin, but he doesn't have his plasma rifle anymore."

Frank nodded, but then a new thought buzzed through his head, "He knows you've got his gun, right?"

Armitage nodded.

"If this is the same guy who killed Ginger and Justin, what makes you think he won't just come over here and get it?"

She thought about this for a moment, but the answer to that was immediately obvious. "If he does, I'll be waiting."

* * *

The lights in the hallway flickered erratically in a constant, unsteady pattern, unsettling to anyone left in the building who might have cared. Like so many older buildings in East Saint Lowell, this apartment complex had become a home for the hopeless and the careless, who had long since given up on their own future and drowned out their past either in alcohol or drugs, or interminable self pity. 

The elevator doors opened on the fifth floor, and a single passenger stepped out, clutching his injured right arm at the severed wrist, trailing blood and fluids behind him from more than dozen massive bullet wounds. He turned down the hallway to apartment 512, unlocked it with a wireless mental command and disappeared inside. Old drunk who had formerly inhabited this shabby apparent—before the untimely parting of his head from his body—had owned almost no furniture except for a computer table and a dozen or so folding chairs. This, of course, had been perfect for the infiltrator's intentions.

He pulled up the folding chair to the computer table in the bedroom, accessing the portable computer unit he had salvaged from the Farnsville Factory. It only took him a few moments to get past the firewalls to the Planetary Navigation Mainframe, and once inside he used the spaceport communication lines to carry his message to his base of operations, _"Dan Claude 6104,"_ the words formed in his head and beamed directly to his benefactor on the other side of the planet, _"Goddamn pigs got in my way. Heavy damage and loss of weapon. I have a dildo for a right arm. Secondary weapons still intact, but aint a worth a damn against Thirds."_

The response came almost immediately, text-message only from the desk of whoever it was who gave him his orders, _Saint Lowell checkpoint at 1541 Baker Street and 810 South Wabash Street. Choose supply point at your discretion. Update primary objective to reacquire primary weapon, and eliminate local opposition. Secondary objective is to reacquire previous target list and complete assigned mission._

"To hell with that," He said aloud, _"Send me a new rifle, asshole!"_

The message from headquarters only repeated again, the mission commanders apparently not liking his attitude. _"Fine, looser, I'll play it your way."_ He disconnected from the server, walked out of the bedroom into the large living room where the rest of his supplies sat waiting for him. Besides the thirty spare power cells for his plasma rifle, he had a dozen each of shotguns, handguns, sub-machineguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, grenade launchers, mortars, anti-tank missiles, heavy machineguns, and enough ammo for each weapon to fight a small war. Getting them all into the building had been no small task, but getting them out again would, he was sure, provide countless hours of entertainment.

Amidst the weapons, even more valuable, ten folding chairs were arranged in a row, each occupied by a dormant T-640 android, dressed in slacks and a sleeveless shirt. By his mental command alone, four of the androids became active, rose ponderously to their feet and stood at attention before him. All ten of them looked exactly alike, life-size GI-Joes with vacant, boring expressions as blank as the minds behind them. "Alright you dumb bastards," He said dramatically as if giving orders to some valiant army, "Take weapons and ammo for anti-personnel battle. Load target data from the police network on the SLPD, then meet me at the rendezvous point in twenty four hours. Got it?"

"Yes sir," All four of them said in perfect unison, even in the same voice. He watched them move about the room, gathering up weapons and ammunition belts. Each of them a heavy machinegun, which they would later conceal under a trench coat along with spare ammunition drums and a randomly selected backup weapon (the T-640s all thought alike anyway, so it was safe to assume they would all pickup sub-machinepistols as their backup). He didn't wait for them to finish, he knew they could do the rest on their own.

Back out of the apartment, back down the stuffy hallway to the elevator, back out into the city and on his way to the checkpoint setup by operatives in the service of his benefactors. Why he even bothered to take orders from them he even now couldn't be sure of, but in the front of his mind he was sure it had something to do with his programming. "I'm completely mad," He said to himself, "I guess I should be thankful to have some _reason_ to this madness," Somehow this line of thought lead him down an interesting new avenue, "That's right... they never specifically told me to keep it a secret, now did they?" He chuckled to himself at his own demented brilliance, "Why that's a great idea! I can't get the bitch myself, might as well send out the dogs!" He laughed again, basking in his own insane brilliance, "First things first: need to get these damn holes plugged."

Immediately the thought of his detective foe flashed through his electronic mind, and he laughed to himself, "I'd love to plug one of _her_ holes while I'm at it..."

* * *

"Satellite scan shows no activity," Armitage said as Syllabus stopped the car at the curb, "And the car isn't here either. Are you sure this is the right house?" 

Syllabus checked his pocket computer, then nodded. "Positive. It's the only Justin Donald within five miles of the harbor.You wanna wait for a search warrant?"

"Like hell." Armitage threw the door open before Syllabus cut the engine, ran towards the house with her gun drawn and ready. He jumped out of the car himself and struggled to keep up with her, but barely halfway from the car to the front door Armitage sprang up the stairs and kicked in the front door, immediately disappearing inside.

Syllabus stopped in the doorway, entering more cautiously. It was dark inside, and unusually warm. A strange odor filled the air as soon as he walked in, and looking around for just a moment he found Armitage standing in the doorway to the kitchen in the back of the house, staring at the ground. "Find something?"

"Yep."

"What is it?" Syllabus walked up next to her and looked down; from there he immediately turned away in disgust.

Her clothes were strewn about the kitchen in no particular arrangement, and the woman they belonged to was lying on the ground, bound at the wrists and ankles by her own shoelaces. She clearly dead, the cause of which seemed to be a massive hole in the center of her torso between her breasts.

"Single gunshot wound to the left shoulder... ten-millimeter, armor piercing..." Armitage knelt down over the body, poked her finger into the hollow, "Cause of death was a massive wound penetrating the sternum with... a fist," She looked the body over more carefully, examining her from head to toe at a glance, "Signs of repeated sexual assault."

"Before or after she died?" Syllabus said, turning around slowly.

"Both, I think." Armitage reached down and carefully parted her legs, "That's not semen though."

Syllabus switched his eyes into multi-spectral scan mode and ran the data through his wrist computer. Almost immediately the analysis appeared in a window in his field of vision, "It's synthetic," he said, as the machine took it's first analysis, "Condensed protein culture. Similar to semen, but a lot more potent. They use it in fertility clinics."

Armitage looked around the room for just a minute, then walked over to the kitchen table, "So that's it..."

"What?" Syllabus stood up and looked towards her.

"You see that hole in her chest?"

He glanced back at the body, then back at Armitage, "Yeah,"

Armitage pointed at a salad bowl in the center of the table; a pile of flesh was stacked up their, sliced up and carved like a meal, "Stomach and small intestine," She said, "What's left of them."

Syllabus shuddered, "Why did he...?"

"Thirds use an Ionesco median to regulate their system. The solution breaks down overtime, so occasionally they have to replenish their supply either directly, or by ingesting the basic chemical compounds and manufacturing it in their own bodies. It just so happens that about 94 of the necessary chemical components can also be found in human organs."

"Well that's just wonderful..." Syllabus had had enough; he did one last scan of the body with the snooper, then headed back for the front door, leaving the house and calling the crime scene in to the investigators.

Armitage emerged a few moments later, and tapped him on the shoulder, "I'm hungry."

"Are you shitting me?" If his ears weren't attached to his head he would have taken them off and checked them for defects.

"I always get hungry around corpses. Don't ask me why."

Syllabus sighed, and started down the porch steps to the car. He opened the driver-side door just as two squad cars arrived, escorting a police van with the investigators and the coroners. One of the squad cars pulled up next to him, and the officer leaned out the window, "Danford wants you back at the station as soon as possible. Finish your rounds and then head back."

"Gotcha," Syllabus sat down in the seat and closed the door, started the engine as the squad car moved out of his way, "You know, you might wanna see a shrink. If you get hungry around bodies, it's probably a sign of cannibalism."

Armitage chuckled. "There's a little barbarian in all of us, Detective."

"Stop calling me that. My name is Ross," He said, pulling the car into the street. "So what are you hungry for?"

"Pizza." She said, "The cheap kind."

* * *

Frank Cooper followed Armitage' instructions to the letter, all the necessary turns and junctions, detours, ramps, exits and stoplights. The last leg of the trip, however, deeply troubled him, as he found himself suddenly facing the wrong way on a one-way street. "You're gonna get a ticket, Dad," Jennifer said. 

"Why? I'm only going one way."

She rolled her eyes at the corny/ancient pun, and leaned against the window. "Why can't we just go home?"

"You know the answer to that question."

A horrifying image flashed through her mind: a picture of her mother lying broken and shattered behind their house, with her father lying in a similar condition only a few feet away, and Jennifer herself dangling in the air with Dan Claude's fist around her throat, "So where are we going anyway?"

Frank glanced to one side and read the address, then turned to the left and pulled into the driveway, "Right here."

Their host was already standing in the doorway when he stopped the engine and stepped out of his car. Armitage had told them ahead of time that Julian was young, barely a year older than Jennifer in fact. Frank could never figure out how it was that the boy lived alone in this house, or how he managed to pay for it, or how he managed to support himself besides. To this, Armitage had replied only, "He has his way."

Julian Apollo waved at them as they walked towards his front door, "Welcome to my humble abode." He stepped back from the doorway and the two of them entered, "Sandwich?"

"No thanks." Frank said, then glanced at Jennifer. She seemed more than a little withdrawn, probably just shy, "You don't mind, do you? Your sister told me you like to keep to yourself."

Julian shrugged, "Normally, yes, but she's always buggin me about being more social. I'll try anything once."

"Do you want some payment or something?"

"No payment," He shook his head, "Just take off your shoes at the door, and sacrifice a virgin every Tuesday."

"So, who goes first, then?" Jennifer snickered, "Me or you?"

Julian grinned, "I'm not a virgin."

"Liar."

"It's true!"

"Yeah, right!" Jennifer took her shoes off and set them neatly on the rug next to the door. Opening up slightly, she walked up the short flight of stairs to the living room and looked around the house. Smallish kitchen with an opening to the living room, which on its own was not much to look at. Yet there was one particularly eye catching feature; nearly half the side wall was dominated by a gigantic liquid-crystal TV screen, and on the floor in front of it was a small box the size of a suitcase that she immediately recognized as a very powerful computer unit. She could have reacted any one of a thousand possible ways, but the one that suited the moment the most was, "Ooohhh."

Julian appeared next to her, grinning proudly, "This is my baby," He said smugly, "The sixth most powerful supercomputer on the planet. The primary is in the basement, it's about the size of a refrigerator."

Jennifer stepped up to the small box on the floor and ran her fingers over its cover, gingerly, as if it were encrusted with diamonds, "You made this yourself?"

"Yep."

"It's beautiful," She placed her open palm on the top of the box gently. After a moment the computer powered up, the giant screen lit up with letters and numbers of the system's startup code, then the A.I. sputtered awake.

A somewhat androgynous, childish voice greeted her from the speakers on the side of the room, "Heyyyyyy!"

"Hi," Jennifer sat back on the carpet and looked up at the screen thoughtfully.

Julian sat down next to her, "Delphi, this is Jennifer. She's going to be staying here for a little while."

Frank Cooper watched silently from the background, seeing the children sitting side by side on the carpet, talking with a disembodied voice and a matrix of letters and numbers that shortly disappeared and gave way to a massively elaborate desktop directory.

"Hiya Jenny!" The voice said, and in a moment the air above the computer unit crackled in static as a holographic image formed of a brown-skinned girl no older than Julian, dressed in what appeared to be an air force flight jumpsuit complete with insignia and rank pins. "Are you Julian's girlfriend?"

She eyeballed him for a few moments, then shook her head, "No way."

"Oh, good. So I don't have to get jealous..." The holographic image tried to look series, then gave up the attempt and collapsed into helpless snickering.

"Are you this computer's A.I.?" Jennifer said.

"I am _now_," She stood up and walked through them, moving now to examine Frank Cooper in an eerily personified gesture, "My real name's Samantha. I'm undead."

Frank glared at her in a mixture of suspicion and amusement, "Undead?"

"She's sort of my roommate," Julian explained plainly, "She got caught in that riot last month."

Frank grimaced, "What did they do, crucify you?"

Samantha sighed, "No, they hacked me to pieces with a diamond drill. Julian found my head in a scrap heap and saved my ghost to his hard disk."

Jennifer smiled, "That's smart!"

"It saved me the trouble having to program a fresh A.I." Julian smiled, "Plus she's fun to talk to."

"No I'm not! Take that back!" The hologram disappeared, then manifested again suspended in the air in front of him, upside down, wagging her tongue mockingly.

"Is there room in the memory bank for more than one ghost?" Jennifer asked reflexively.

Samantha pondered the question for just a moment, "I'm not sure. The server uses a crystal-matrix thingamajig. I don't know how much space a normal ghost takes up."

Julian pondered the question himself for a few moments, "Theoretically, the memory bank has enough room for four or five ghosts. But Delphi's modem uses a quantum-effects transmitter just like the wireless function of the Thirds, so once your ghost is digitized you can go just about anywhere."

"Really?" Samantha, it seemed, hadn't realized that until just now, "So I'm not really trapped inside your system, Julian?"

"Probably not, but I'm not sure the modem can handle data transfers that size."

"Only one way to find out! Back in a flash..." The hologram disappeared, leaving the three of them to their own devices for a few moments.

Jennifer, meanwhile, put her hand on the top of the box again. The giant screen in front of them came alive at her unspoken commands, tunneling through file after file, folder after folder, opening and closing programs and documents, directories and archives, bots and hosts, one after another wit such speed that the girl began laughing out loud as if she were running through a field.

"How's it look, Jen?" Frank said, sitting on the couch behind them.

"It's awesome," She raced through a dozen more files, finally stopping at a particular bot in an obscure folder, "You have a bot spammer?"

Julian chuckled, "Sometimes I send it after the big programming companies. It runs around their network making fun of people."

Jennifer laughed, "That's cool! You even have a poly-phonic host so it sounds like more of a smartass!"

"Yep," Julian shot her a sidelong glance, "You know a lot about this stuff for a twelve year old. Are you..." His eyes darted to Frank for just an instant, "Are you a... special person?"

Jennifer caught his drift, understanding the euphemism without difficulty. "Yes."

"Cool."

A buzzing sound rang out in the air behind them. Frank Cooper snatched a wireless phone from his pocket, looked at the screen, then shrugged, "I'll be right back." He took the call and walked off to the kitchen where he could talk freely without annoying the youngsters.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Jennifer leaned over and whispered in Julian's ear, "Don't tell my dad, but my hacker name is Cyrene."

Julian raised a brow, "Are you serious?"

She nodded.

"Did you know Macrosoft has a bounty on your head?"

She nodded again, this time smiling proudly, "Sixty million dollars. That's twice the amount I stole from their bank account."

In just the time it took for Frank Cooper to say to his caller, "Okay, I'll call you back," Julian ran a few equations in his head, weighed his options, calculated his possibilities, then made his decision.

"Jennifer, will you marry me?"

She blushed, "Do you have a ring?"

Julian fished through one of his pockets, and in a few seconds came up with a clear-plastic trinket he had gotten out of a capsule machine for fifty bucks and saved it for just such an occasion. "Here."

Jennifer held up her hand, and Julian slipped it onto her ring finger. "When I turn sixteen, I expect you to buy me a gold one."

Julian shrugged, "I'm sure I'll be tired of you by then."

"Nerd," She muttered, and leaned back on the carpet.

Samantha's hologram reappeared on top of the computer unit, grinning like a cat, "Julian, you wouldn't _believe_ how much empty space there is on the PNM! It's humongonormous!"

Frank Cooper came back into the room at the tail end of the conversation, "Can you paint me a picture?"

Samantha raised her hand to one side, and the screen behind her lit up with an image, "If this is the PNM's main system..." A satellite image of Downtown Saint Lowell appeared on the screen, "And these are the different navigation databases," the image zoomed out to show Saint Lowell and the surrounding suburbs, along with two smaller nearby cities, "Then this is the amount of empty space." The screen zoomed out tremendously, racing away from the surface until the entire global map of Mars filled the screen, "And that's not even the half of it. The PNM is designed to handle all planetary navigation charts for the next two hundred years, so they built it with more memory capacity than it could ever possibly need. And of course, even if _that_ runs out, they can just build more servers for it."

Frank nodded in agreement, "Right now there are twenty two servers on Mars, all buried deep underground. Each one is the size of a football stadium."

Julian looked at Samantha hopefully, "You should probably backup your ghost on the PNM." He turned around and glanced at Frank, "You might want to do the same."

"Later," Frank turned stiffly and started for the door, "I need to talk to Armitage about a few things. I'll be back later."

"Don't be gone long, Dad." Jennifer said.

"I won't," He grinned over his shoulder, "Try and be good, okay?"

"Okay." She waved at him as he left, and the instant he closed the door behind him she turned to Julian and Samantha, "Okay, now, let's see that bot spammer..."


	6. Chapter 5

_I will cause many peoples to be appalled at you, and their kings will shudder with horror because of you when I brandish my sword before them. On the day of your downfall each of them will tremble every moment for his life. -_ Ezekiel 32:10

* * *

**Chapter 5**

Detective Syllabus returned to the driver's seat with a yawn, tossed the stack of napkins into Armitage's lap. Two of the four pizza slices had disappeared in just the short time it took for him to get the extra napkins he had asked for, and by the time he started the engine again, number three was halfway to oblivion. "You've been skipping meals, haven't you?"

"Of course not. I'm always on schedule." She took a massive bite of the pizza slice, chewed for a moment, then stuffed the rest of it into her mouth, "I just don't schedule them often." She said through loaded cheeks.

"Oh, sure." Syllabus leaned back in his chair, half watching, half listening to the sound of his companion munching away on a cheap pan-pizza that probably contained less than an ounce of natural anything. The weight of the day's experiences had exhausted him heavily, yet now he decided was a good time to get some answers out of his mysterious partner in anti-crime. "Hey Naomi, I've been meaning to you ask you..." He looked over and suppressed a laugh, seeing her cheeks so packed full of food it had almost changed the shape of her head, "Why are two street-walkers from Division Twelve working an anti-robot case?"

With a powerful combination of jaw and throat muscles she forced down a massive lump of pizza, then set the now-empty box on the dashboard, "I would have thought that was obvious, Ross."

"No, it really isn't. Division Twelve usually handles organized crime and some corporate corruption cases. Even if you're both cyber warfare experts..."

Armitage shrugged. "We also specialize in witness protection."

"Yeah, well..."

"That being said, what do you think our purpose is for this assignment?"

Syllabus thought for a moment, not sure what to think about it and afraid to guess wrong for fear of making an ass of himself, "Are you protecting the Thirds?"

"The Martian Allied Government has an interest in these new androids. Whoever can master this technology is going to have a huge political and military advantage."

"Who built these androids?"

Armitage shrugged, "No one knows. We've been working on this for years, but now it looks like our competitors are jumping ahead of us."

"Not _that_ far ahead," He found himself rolling down a blind alley of logical thought before he could stop himself, "If they have to send a hit-man to knock off the other Thirds, obviously they're no closer to the technology than we are. But that doesn't make a lot of sense since they obviously have access to the Thirds..."

Armitage grinned, "It's not the Tyhhreans we're worried about. They don't have the know-how to master that technology, and even if they did they'd go out of their way to keep for themselves."

"Then who _are_ we competing with?"

"I'll tell you when you guess right."

Syllabus rolled his eyes, "Well, screw you then."

"Your place or mine?" Armitage folded her arms behind her head and reclined the seat back almost horizontal.

Syllabus moved on to the next question without so much as a warning, "Who the hell is Jacques Dan Claude?"

"Officially he's my older brother."

That raised an eyebrow, "And unofficially?"

Armitage stiffened, "Jacques Dan Claude is the collective pseudonym of a terrorist network operating out of Omania, supported by Tyhhrean funds. Jacques was one of their founding fathers, and he was so prolific in it that any time his group did anything they always used his name to claim responsibility. Now there are about six or seven hundred people using the name Jacques Dan Claude."

_Tyhhreans again._ Syllabus was starting to notice another pattern, and this one was a little more transparent. "Your brother was the original Dan Claude?" He chose his words carefully, hoping to catch her in a slip of the tongue.

Armitage nodded, "Something like that. He's sort of the black sheep of the family... he went to Omania to start a career as a warlord, total power trip."

Syllabus grunted, "Does MIC know about it? I can't imagine being the kid sister of an international terrorist is good for your security clearance."

"You wouldn't think so, but..." She turned and looked at him tenderly, "A few years ago, Jacques sent his assassins after me and Julian trying to keep us from blabbing about him to the authorities. I did five weeks in a state hospital, then I got out and applied to MIC's counterterrorist unit, Division Four. I spent three years tracking Jacques before he went underground and the Collective reassigned me to Division Twelve."

"Why did they transfer you? Personal bias?"

Armitage shook her head. "He just wasn't a priority anymore. Besides, I run into his nut boys more often in the organized crime rackets than I ever did with counterterrorism."

Syllabus sighed. It was just another potentially important piece of the puzzle that now turned out to be nothing more than a corner segment, "How come all of your siblings have different last names?"

"Because we all have different mothers."

"I didn't know Asakura was a playboy." Syllabus started the engine again and pulled the car out of its parking space.

"He wasn't." Armitage rolled down the window, and Syllabus stopped the car close to a trash can where she now tossed the empty pizza box and the napkins before he drove off again, "He was a wacko and a pimp."

"I thought you said he was a brilliant inventor and robotics guru?"

"He was _a lot_ of things, Ross." The memories seemed somehow painful for her; she reached into her little jacket and retrieved her dark sunglasses, relieved to find them unbroken, "Paranoid, sadistic, brilliant, arrogant, compassionate, honest, perverse, selfish, impulsive... just a walking contradiction. He would do the most horrible things and then turn around and do something wonderful to make up for it. I loved him as much as I despised him."

Behind the nearly black tint from her sunglasses it was impossible to discern any emotion from her, but for just an instant the light from a neon sign outside the car glared through the glasses and exposed her; her eyes were watery, close to tears.

"He did something to you, didn't he?"

She shuddered at the sudden rush of memory, then turned on her side away from him as tears started rolling down her cheeks. "He... it was..." Her voice gave no sign of it, but something in just that one phrase was clear enough that he decided he didn't want to know.

"How did your father die?" Syllabus said, gradually changing the subject.

"No one knows. He disappeared when I was in college." Armitage tilted the chair up and sat straight. Her face was dry now, as were her eyes, but she kept the sunglasses on all the same.

"So the date of his death in the records...?"

"He was working on a project related to the Thirds around the time he disappeared. I assume he went underground to hide from Jacques and his thugs. We have some agents on his trail, but the death certificate is a cover to keep our competitors from finding him first."

Syllabus didn't know why, but at this moment he found himself laughing out loud. He managed to keep his composure just in time to avoid running a red light and stopped just short of the crosswalk.

"What's so funny?" Armitage said, tilting her sunglasses up to look him in the eye, "And by the way, what's the big idea going through my background? Is this case boring to you or something?"

Still smiling, Syllabus moved the car again as the light turned green, "Boring or not, you're a lot more interesting. I've caught serial killers with less shady backgrounds."

Armitage sat back in her chair and folded her arms indifferently. "If you dig deep enough you'll find that's pretty common in the MIC."

"I don't doubt it... what the hell is _this_?" He slowed the car to a stop at a massive crowd of individuals choking the intersection, marching across almost parade fashion but in no particular formation. As the seconds ticked off, their number and density seemed to increase by exponents, as did the number of signs and posters they carried overhead.

One sign in particular stood out, so large it took at least ten people to carry it: _Mass Produced Sin!_ Syllabus tapped a button on his dashboard, and instantly connected with the dispatcher back at the 6th Precinct, "Hey Pearl, this is Detective Syllabus on 13th Street. You heard anything about a demonstration today?"

The dispatcher groaned in annoyance, "We just started getting calls on it four minutes ago. The World Church of the Creator held a rally unannounced this morning and it turned into a big march. We're not sure if they intended it this way, but it doesn't really matter."

"Do you have a report on the size?"

"Two to three thousand, about six blocks long."

"Damn." Syllabus put the car into part and leaned back in his seat. "I wish this was a squad car. Maybe we could use the siren to clear a path."

Armitage sighed. "Wake me up when they pass." She leaned against the car door and sagged into nothingness.

* * *

He couldn't help but notice the peculiar scent of perfume hanging around the young woman behind the reception desk at the OBN television station in Downtown Saint Lowell. She was a perfectly normal looking woman, in fact Dan Claude found her more than a little attractive—blonde, blue-eyed, athletic figure. He was so impressed by the sight of her that the first thought that crossed his mind when he walked through the revolving door and saw her there was the prospect of chasing her down in a dark alley in true, predatory indulgence. Unfortunately it was business before pleasure, at least for the moment. "Hey babes," He said, and tapped his fingers on the desk, "Do you have a building server here? Something maybe I can use to hijack the telecommunications network for this entire country?"

The receptionist looked at him suspiciously, trying to decide if he was joking or not. "You know what, sir, I really don't..."

He squinted at the name tag on her shirt, and asked, "Cora Manning, huh? How old are you, Cora?"

Again, she looked at him suspiciously, but in this case only as a distraction as her free hand pushed the silent alarm button under the desk. "Why do you ask?"

"Because you look familiar." He looked at her face and thought for a moment, "Do you have a sister, maybe?"

She pressed the silent alarm again, "No. Why?"

Two more men came through the revolving door, both carrying black duffle bags. They stopped behind Dan Claude, and one of them placed the bag at his feet and unzipped the bag. Dan Claude looked at the open bag, then gasped in realization, "I _thought_ you looked familiar! Your hair color is different and your eyes are a bit wider, but the resemblance is _striking_!"

"Resemblance to who?"

In a movement too fast for any humane eyes to follow, his arm snapped across the desk like a springing cobra, snatched her by the throat and dragged her across the desk, throwing her face down on the floor. She landed with a heavy thump on the tile, and found herself staring into a set of all-too-familiar eyes set into the anguished face of a disembodied head, "Maria Patrick," He said with a snicker. "You're from the same production line."

She felt two pairs of strong hands gripping her shoulders; the two men who had come in behind Dan Claude dragged her across the room to the door behind the reception desk. One of them plugged an NFC cable to the back of her head, the other connected the same cable to a fairly large and apparently home-made computer unit in the other dufflebag.

The young woman struggled with the two men, tried to pull herself free, but in moments she found herself suddenly paralyzed by a force she couldn't quite understand. It didn't take her long to realize what was happening, then a moment of horror as she felt her own programming defenses failing one by one. The gravity of the situation began to sink in, and lost to helplessness her eyes filled with tears, "Wh-what are you going to do with me?" She said, by now almost whimpering.

Dan Claude seemed highly amused. "Giving up already?" He thought for a moment, then chuckled, "I see. You figured out that I've already hacked the building security system and shut off the silent alarms."

She felt an itch in her fingertips, which slowly rose into a burning sensation that filled her arms and legs. She knew, though, that it was all in her head. The computer was tunneling through her last barriers like an electronic power drill. Soon the pain became intense and highly localized, right in the center of her brain. She lost final control of her body now, and had she still any influence she would have screamed in despair.

_"Don't let me be misunderstood,"_ said a voice in her head, the voice of her assailant, _"But despite your resemblance to Maria Patrick, I happen to find you rather captivating. And what _is_ that perfume you're wearing?"_

Even in telepresence, she was still whimpering in despair, _"Are you going to kill me?"_

_"Eventually,"_ He put his hand on her thigh under her skirt, _"Unlike you Thirds, I am not a machine, I am a life form. And like all life forms, I survive by destroying other life forms. And like all intelligent life forms, I am forever experimenting with ever more creative ways to destroy other life forms."_ Then he smiled, _"You have nothing to worry about, because you are alive. But you do have the pleasure of being the first in a new series of experiments."_

_"Experiment?" _She felt her mind slipping away, a strangely blissful sensation that seemed entirely out of place here. Her emotional state descended immediately to neutral, then in a strange succession passed through happiness, indifference, anger, and ultimately through something like a mind-numbingly powerful surge of lust that disappeared as quickly as it had come. Her perception began to dissolve, and she felt her personality collapsing on itself. A new one was beginning to manifest in its place, growing within her like a cancer. And in one last horrific epiphany before the end came, she realized that nothing inside her had changed at all, but only that her own personality—everything she was, everything she knew, everything that defined her identity—was being walled up in a dark corner of her mind, never to be retrieved again. Then the wall solidified around her, and just like that, Cora Manning was dead.

From within her mental prison, she heard Dan Claude's words echoing to her as if from a great distance, _"How does it feel, Cora?"_ He asked, even now not expecting an answer, _"How does it feel to have someone devour your soul?"_

Her eyes snapped open. She stood up slowly, ran her fingers through her hair, and with a slow, lazy move, pulled the NFC cable out of the back of her head and looked at Dan Claude with a sleazy grin, "Goddamn, you are a _pig_."

Dan Claude took it as a measure of success. "Don't change the subject. How does it feel?"

"I just told you. It feels like making love to a pig."

"So... is that a bad thing?"

She tossed her jacket on the floor next to the duffle bag, then ripped off her blouse and tossed that on the floor next to it, leaving only her sports bra and a small holster hanging from her right shoulder for a pocket computer, "What was it you were looking for?"

"A building server," Dan Claude smiled brightly, "I need to find a way to hijack the communications network for the entire country."

She rolled her eyes, then turned and gestured for him to follow. "Why don't you just use a satellite?"

"Too easy to block out."

She unlocked a door marked "employees only" and lead Dan Claude and his accomplices deeper into the building. Somehow she found herself suddenly blessed with a library of knowledge on a variety of subjects, from the hacking technique he had used to get control of her, through a plethora of combat styles, right down through the nature of Dan Claude himself. She lead them around a corner and up a flight of stairs, asking as she went, "So now that you've hacked my brain, are you planning to hack my body too?"

"I already have." His eyes glowed for a moment as a short signal beamed from his brain to hers. Immediately stopped on the stairs in mid step, shuddering from head to toe in a some odd combination of indescribable pleasure and unbearable pain. "I would consider you to be a... pet." The signal cut off, and she collected herself and began to move on.

"You're such a pig." She muttered.

"Well you know what they say about casting pearls before a swine," He chuckled, following his climb behind her. "Just get me into the server and keep me in for seven hours. Then you stay here and wait for me to come back."

"Whatever... damn pig."

Feeling a little vindictive, Dan Claude sent the signal into her brain again, and once again she collapsed on the stairs shuddering spasmodically from waves of electrical mayhem running wild in her body. One of the T-640s put his hand over her mouth to keep her quiet, muffling an otherwise ear-piercing scream that would have caught the attention of the entire building.

Dan Claude stood a few steps behind her, keeping her punishment steady, watching her writhing on the stairs completely out of control. He couldn't tell if she was in ecstasy or agony, but as was his nature, he no longer cared. "My dear Cora... I do believe this experiment is a success."

* * *

Syllabus sat bored for a almost half an hour as the march dragged on, staring at the crowds as they poured past, oblivious to his frustration and wrapped up in their own fanatical nonsense. Every manner of human ugliness was displayed here; signs and chants ranging from the childishly clever to the intensely hateful, and more than a few demonstrators even carrying the severed parts of androids at the end of a stick. Three teenagers in one group even had an entire smashed body between them on a plywood platform, impaled in a dozen places with ten-inch nails.

"Makes you wonder, doesn't it?" Armitage said, still slumped against the door in the appearance of sleep. Through the space between her face and the lens of her sunglasses he could see her eyes open, watching the crowd anxiously, "Would they be doing any of this for a group of humans?"

"Of course not. That's the point. Robots aren't human, but humans keep having to compete with them. I understand the sentiment, but these people are religious fanatics."

"Whose fault is it, then?" She sighed, "If you hate androids so much, why the hell do you keep building them?"

"That's big business for you. They manufacture a cheep labor force they don't have to pay and don't have to maintain. The company makes a huge profit and gives nothing back to the community." Syllabus turned to her with a crooked grin, "See, it's not the robots they're angry with, it's the corporate rape of society they represent."

Armitage sat up and snatched her sunglasses off her face. She grinned at him mischievously, "And I know the cure for that."

"What?"

"Take all the androids out of the workforce and put them in charge of their own companies. This way everybody has their own job."

Syllabus chuckled. "The big companies _are_ run by robots. They're programmed to chase the almighty dollar, anything else that is just a distraction."

Armitage nodded in agreement. "If you ask me, the mob is lynching the wrong—"

One of the large TV screens fixed to the side of record store crackled in static. At that moment so did the speakers of the city's emergency broadcast system, and every active radio in every car in Saint Lowell, every TV set, every CD player, every android without a fractal program, even the PA system of the department stores roared collectively with a deranged voice, shouting loud enough to command the attention of everything with working ears: _"Hellooooooo! Listen up you stupid sheeple! I've got some important information for you!"_

The voice exploded in Syllabus' radio with such intensity that it rattled the windows of the car. He turned down his radio, even as Armitage threw open the car door and cast her eyes toward the giant monitor above the record store. All of the demonstrators in the column did the same, their attention thoroughly grabbed by the rude, explosive and clearly illegal broadcast.

"For the next century or so, all TV and radio channels belong exclusively to me, Jacques Dan Claude. The police and the emergency channels will have control again any second_... but who cares?_" Dan Claude laughed hysterically on the monitor, then stepped slightly to the side, "It's better this way, after all. The regular media always screws up! For example, I'm sure none of you knew that Maria Patrick isn't in any hospital, and she didn't suffer any goddamn overdose! You stupid assholes will believe just about _anything_!"

A window opened in the screen next to him, playing the recording from the hotel where Patrick was gunned down. Syllabus noticed immediately that the angle was different; clearly this was taken from the memory data of the T-640 that had been his accomplice. "Here's our cutie now..." He said with a running commentary, then as his own image came into view, "Ooh! Who's this handsome feller? Could this be a budding romance for our lovely pop star?" The tape played out in slightly reduced speed; all of Saint Lowell watched through the eyes of the older android as Dan Claude forced the young singer to her knees, seemingly amused by the entire ordeal. His plasma rifle came into view, and now the entire city watched the plasma bolts demolish the pop start, piece by metal piece, reducing her to a pile of twisted scrap metal on the carpet. "Guess not... hahahaha!"

The initial shock of the gruesome scene swept through the crowd like a wave, but what followed immediately after was another shock as the entire demonstration found themselves staring a pile of circuits and transistors where human organs should have been. Dan Claude laughed as he came back into view, the window shrinking to a corner of the screen as it played through another execution of another Third, with dozens more videos lined up right behind it, "The great Maria Patrick!" He said dramatically, "The little bitch was a robot the whole fucking time! How many of you idiots went out and bought her last album? Show of hands?" Dan Claude reached off-screen for a moment, and raised before the camera the severed hand of Maria Patrick; at this he laughed long and hard as the little window next to his head played off yet another android assassination. "These disgusting little things are everywhere. They look and act _exactly_ like human beings. They do it all! They walk like us, they talk like us, they eat, sleep and drink like us, they fart like us, they even _bone _like us!" Then he chuckled, "No, I take it back. Nobody gives better head..." Again he reached off camera, this time holding up the severed head of Susan Cooper, "... than a Third-Type android!"

A few of the protestors began to grow agitated. Some left the group in disgust, but the majority of them grew agitated in another way. Shouts of anger rippled from among them with each word Dan Claude spoke, but even as the feeling picked up momentum, these were clearly in agreement with the pirated signal filling their ears and eyes. Dan Claude had their full attention, and soon he would have their full cooperation.

"By now you're probably asking, _why?_ Why are these new clunkers showing up everywhere? Why are androids pretending to be human?" Again he held up the head of Susan Cooper, "You ostrich sons of bitches have been sticking your heads in the sand too long and now you have things like _this_ walking around with you! You let a robot replace Maria Patrick! You let a robot replace Ambassador Marriott! And they're not the only ones... everywhere you look these fucking machines are snatching up all the best and the brightest—" He chuckled, "And the not so brightest—and taking their place! Take this one for instance..." He waved Susan Cooper's disembodied head before the camera, "This one used to be a faithful wife and mother to a little girl named Jennifer Cooper. But wouldn't you know it? Those sneaky bastards replaced Mrs. Cooper with this disgusting thing here! Oh, and there's more: little Jennifer Cooper, a 7th grader over at Mount Harris middle school is not even _close_ to human, she's a cybernetic freak of nature! A spy-drone, keeping track on the little cunts on the playground, scouting for who _else_ they can replace! Do you follow me yet, Saint Lowell!"

An angry roar exploded from the protestors. Dan Claude by now had them so wrapped around his finger that he could march the lot of them off a cliff without so much as a complaint. Thus, what came next over the broadcast was enough to stop Syllabus' heart in middle of a beat, "Oops! It looks like I've just found _another _one!" The window in the corner of the screen stopped playing execution videos and expanded again, this time filling the air behind Dan Claude. A mug shot photo from a woman's driver's license was displayed, large enough for the entire mass of people to see it clearly, "This is my dear friend, Alia Henderson. She lives at 1841 South Garrison street. She's a high school teacher who every day, hundreds of parents place their lazy, dumbass teenagers into her sole care. Two years ago this woman, along with her husband and two children were replaced by Third-type Androids. What should we do about this?" The window moved to the corner of the screen and another one came up behind Dan Claude, "Or this one, Michelangelo Mardinni of 503 East Nabisco. Think the teacher was bad enough? This son of a bitch is a heart surgeon! He's being sued at the moment for malpractice after one of his patients died of a stroke! What should we do about this?"

Many of the protestors were already moving off down the streets towards the addresses mentioned. Syllabus was already on the radio calling for police escort of the ousted individuals as quickly as Dan Claude could name them; two more names were read off, but then the fourth name appeared...

"How about this guy: Ryan Clancy!" The picture filled the screen behind him, "An ordinary feller! Clancy here runs the hotdog stand on 13th street!" Dan Claude laughed, "That's some shit, isn't it! What should we do about this?"

It would have been just another name, except that when Armitage looked to her right where barely fifteen feet from Syllabus' car, Ryan Clancy stood petrified behind his hotdog stand, staring at the giant monitor in disbelief even as a dozen or so protestors shouted from the crowd, "There he is! Over there!"

"Aw hell..." Armitage climbed back into the car and drew her sidearm. The detective put the car into gear immediately, surged forward, then looped around in front of stopped traffic just before the protestors came surging down the street. The car crossed four lanes of traffic until it jumped the curb onto the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, speeding forward ahead of protestors.

Clancy, by now, took off running down the street as fast as his android legs could carry him—which, it turned out, was only a step or two slower than Syllabus' car. The protestors dropped behind by now, but pedestrians recognizing the fleeing Clancy stepped up in a vain effort to slow his retreat. One man pulled a tire iron out of his trunk and took a swing as the android ran past. He ducked it easily and kept going, and his would-be attacker now leapt out of the way as Syllabus' car came screaming down the sidewalk in hot pursuit.

"I could really use that siren right about now..."

"Think he's running from _us_?" Armitage took out her gun and loaded it.

"What do you think? With your wardrobe we might as well be gang bangers." Clancy looked over his shoulder, and seeing them still in pursuit seemed to double his pace. Unfortunately the moment's distraction did him in, as another car, misreading the detective's intention, jumped the curb where Clancy was running and crashing into him mid-stride, pinning him against the side of a parking garage.

Syllabus slammed his breaks, but not fast enough. They were still skidding at a considerable speed when they collided with the other car—but there was no collision, nor was there an impact. Syllabus turned his head in confusion to see the other car standing on its rear bumper, tilting back over the sidewalk, finally landing again upside down. Clancy seemed visibly winded by his feat of strength, as did nearby pedestrians appear visibly shocked by it. This was her chance; before he could recover, Armitage leapt out of the car and sprinted up to him with near-inhuman swiftness, grabbed him by the collar and half-dragged, half-shoved him back towards Ross' car, "SLPD, Ryan," She said, opening the back door, "We need to get you off the street!"

Clancy slipped into the back seat as Armitage jumped back into the front. The protestors were starting to catch up now as Ross slammed the gas and sped the car off again, back down the sidewalk to the next intersecting street until at last he was back on legal pavement, "You know, you guys really need a siren."

"Ya think?" Syllabus said sourly. He keyed up the police radio and called into the dispatcher, "This is Syllabus, I've got Clancy. Are there any others downtown that need a pickup?"

The dispatcher already had the name on her screen, "Only one: George Van Pelt, a gourmet chef at the..."

"George too!" In a suddenly reflex, Syllabus slammed his breaks and the car screeched to a stop, then put the car in reverse and backed up no more than twenty feet before he found himself double-parked in front of the Radisson Hotel. "That's lucky," Clancy said whistle.

"Van Pelt's an old friend of mine. Go in and get him, Naomi."

Clancy shook his head. "No need. He's coming out."

"How do you know?"

"He just said so."

He looked over his shoulder and noted Clancy's eyes were ablaze with red light. It was a curious effect Syllabus had observed with modern androids whenever they used their wireless function. He had read in a magazine it had something to do with the interaction of electromagnetic waves from their modem—located just behind the eyes—and the nanotech devices in the eyes themselves. Every android had its own distinct color; the civilian robots glowed yellow, the military robots a luminous green. The Thirds, evidently, glowed red.

And true to his prediction, only moments later a single figure in a white chef's coat burst through the glass doors of the Radisson, a group of some twenty youths hot on his tail with weapons and blunt objects of every shape and size. Clancy kicked the door open and then moved over. Van Pelt dove head first into the car, and Syllabus didn't even wait for him to close the door before his foot smashed the gas into the bottom of the floor.

Clancy leaned across the new arrival and closed the door, then in a second action dislodged a butcher knife from the man's lower back. "Having fun yet?" He said cynically.

Van Pelt growled. "Who the hell is this Dan Claude guy? He came up on the speakers and said something about androids replacing people..."

Syllabus looked over his shoulder, "Hiya George," He said in recognition, "If you really _are_ George."

"You wanna test me, Ross?" Van Pelt sighed, "Give me a kettle and some goodies and I'll make your wife's favorite gumbo."

"Your memory's faulty. I don't have a wife."

Van Pelt snorted, "I'm talking about Shelly."

Syllabus laughed out loud, "Oh, right."

Armitage squinted at him, "Who's Shelly?"

"Shelly's an Argyre sea turtle."

Presently she found herself unable to tell if he was joking or not, "Your turtle eats gumbo?"

"Who doesn't?" Van Pelt said proudly, "Even androids eat gumbo. Right Clancy?"

"Damn right." He said strongly. "If you don't like gumbo you don't have a soul."

Syllabus flinched at the remark; in his rearview mirror he stared at Clancy with suddenly increased scrutiny.

Armitage sighed. "I've never had gumbo before."

"Then if we make it through this alive I'll cook a special pot just for you," Van Pelt leaned forward over her shoulder, "For a lovely woman like you, I'd consider it an honor and a privilege."


End file.
